‘They’ve upped the danger’: Armed robberies of mail carriers, thefts on the rise

The person who robbed a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier in Las Vegas on Dec. 9 was looking for one thing: the keys used to open multiple residential mailboxes.

“Now we’re seeing an increase in carriers being robbed,” said Trevor Hudson, U.S. postal inspector in Las Vegas whose office oversees Southern Nevada. “They have upped the danger of it with these armed robberies.”

The Dec. 9 holdup at gunpoint took place at 11:38 a.m. at 3525 Jungle Drive, after the carrier arrived on the route to deliver mail at a townhome complex a block south of East Washington Avenue near North Pecos Road, according to a U.S. Postal Inspection Service release.

Postal inspectors included two photos of the suspect, wearing dark clothing and a face mask, strolling on a sidewalk within the complex.

Keys to mailboxes are U.S. government property, and it’s a serious crime to rob a carrier — those convicted face up to 25 years in federal prison.

$50,000 reward

The Postal Service is offering a hefty reward of $50,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspect or suspects of the Dec. 9 robbery.

Another armed robbery of a carrier’s mailbox keys happened almost exactly a month earlier, on Nov. 8, at 10 Rue De Parc, near Pebble and South Pecos roads, in a Henderson neighborhood, Hudson said.

The criminals are known to leave and come back to open a neighborhood’s cluster residential mailboxes and remove items delivered inside them, he said.

“Generally these mail thieves usually do it in the middle of the night when no one is seeing them,” he said.

Postal inspectors will drive around town looking at hot spots for mail and package thefts, and work with local law enforcement officers to solve cases. Often those efforts pay off as similar incidents die down, but then the perpetrators switch and use different tactics to force their way into mailboxes, Hudson said.

The West Coast sees more mail theft than the East Coast, although postal officials are unsure exactly why, Hudson said.

But officials do know what often drives these people to rob the mail.

“Mail thieves are trying to get their next fix, looking for checks, cash to get money to feed their drug addictions,” he said. “Drug addicts and mail theft go hand in hand.”

Holiday ‘porch pirates’

When it comes to parcel theft, the December holiday season means a higher volume of packages and therefore more for thieves to pick from, Hudson said.

Unfortunately, along with the continuing trend toward online shopping, the number of packages delivered outside homes and stolen by those dubbed “porch pirates” has increased significantly in the past year, according to the home security company Safewise.com.

Based on a survey of 1,000 Americans this year by Safewise, 79 percent of respondents said they were victims of package theft, and about half reported losing more than one item.

Porch pirates made off with 260 million packages across the nation from November 2021 to this November, a jump of 50 million from the previous year, the survey found.

The contents of 40 percent of the packages were valued at $50 to $100. All told, porch thieves made off with $19.5 billion worth of merchandise, according to Safewise.

Still, the vast majority of packages sent make it to the recipients, according to Rob Munoz, a spokesman for Amazon, the Seattle-based online marketplace company.

To minimize porch thievery, Amazon gives its Prime members the ability to have their packages delivered into their garages. Members use a “smart garage door opener” linked to a “myQ” account by adding “Key delivery” at checkout.

Account users may arrange to have their garage door opened and closed with their merchandise placed inside. Customers are notified when a package is delivered on the Amazon Key app on their smartphones.

Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on Twitter.