EDITORIAL: Postal Service shrugs its shoulders over mail theft

The Review-Journal’s Glenn Puit reported this week that postal investigators have “received thousands of complaints about missing or stolen mail in Southern Nevada” over the past year. Yet officials with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service say they have no definitive statistics on mail theft due to problems collecting and analyzing the complaints.

Which tells you all you need to know about the priorities of the U.S. Postal Service.

The agency’s groping-in-the-dark strategy isn’t confined to Las Vegas. An NBC News report in 2020 found that the Postal Service has “no reliable system for tracking mail theft.” An agency statement explained that “The reporting system allows for an individual to label their complaint as mail theft, however, the system is not designed to automatically discern which of these are legitimate complaints of theft of U.S. mail.”

The Postal Service insisted it is working to remedy the problem. “For fiscal year 2021,” the statement to NBC explained, “we are developing a plan to more effectively capture our internal review of these complaints in order to track and report mail theft complaint data.”

It certainly inspires confidence that, after 250 years, the Postal Service has yet to draft a plan to combat or analyze the problem. NBC reported that agency officials claimed they had no theft data dating back more than three years.

Mr. Puit, through a Freedom of Information Act request, determined that some 3,124 complaints about stolen mail were filed in the Las Vegas area since February 2021. The NBC report, which also relied on an FOIA request, found that mail theft reports nationally were up about 600 percent between 2107 and 2020.

The agency’s apathy about mail theft extends to the investigative process. Complaints are rarely comprehensively investigated, and it is common for victims to never receive a follow-up call.

The theft can involve break-ins at cluster residential mailboxes and carrier robberies. Thieves also use “mailbox fishing,” in which they stick a long thin object dotted with glue on the end into a Postal Service collection device and pull out as much mail as they can. NBC news noted that the agency has developed more secure boxes, but the vulnerable devices still dominate in Las Vegas.

Incredibly, one local postal worker said he doesn’t recommend customers use the drive-through mailboxes at local post offices. Then why are they there?

Postal inspector Trevor Hudson told Mr. Puit that mail thieves “just keep changing and evolving.” The same can’t be said of the Postal Service. Mail theft is more than a minor inconvenience for business, seniors relying on Social Security checks or the victims of identity theft.

And the problem will continue to grow unless the Postal Service actually takes concrete steps to address it.