Few Mail Theft Arrests Despite Widespread Anecdotal Accounts

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Since 2005, postal theft has largely disappeared.

According to data from the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), in 2000 there were over 5,700 arrests for mail fraud. In 2019, there were less than half that (2,078).

While it can be difficult to tell how common a crime is occurring outside of reports and arrests, package theft is anecdotally considered to be very common. Research by the firm Safewise, which analyzes home security trends but is also affiliated with a security system marketing company Clearlink, put the total at 210 million packages in 2021 alone based on Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics. Neighborhood listservs like Nextdoor are regularly filled with descriptions of Amazon packages stolen from porches.

While many of those thefts may not be packages delivered by the United States Postal Service (USPS) and therefore not tracked by the USPIS, USPS deliveries still account for around 11 percent of thefts, or 23.1 million packages. Thefts from other delivery companies, like UPS and FedEx, are covered by state laws.

Yet, arrests for package theft are at their nadir. According to USPIS annual reports obtained by Investigative Economics, arrests numbered around 5,000-6,800 per year prior to 2005. Since 2008, it's never been above 3,000 arrests per year. USPIS annual reports don’t mention the cause of the decline, and the USPIS declined to comment for this story.

In December of 2006, right before the time of the largest decline in arrests, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA). The bill was contentious for requiring the postal service pre-fund its retirement benefits for employees, something not required of other agencies, without increasing postal rates more than the rate of inflation. It also required that USPS regularly measure service performance, which partially led to the use of intelligent mail barcodes (IMB) in postal delivery.

Mail theft is often the largest category of crime enforced by the USPIS, representing on the order of 56 percent of all arrests at a time. With the decline in arrests, it's now down to around 35 percent of all cases.

Other types of postal delivery-related cases have not seen such a decline. For example, arrests related to drug distribution through the mail have only gone up. Once it was around 1,500 a year, now it averages 2,000 a year.