One day soon, I should receive from the U.S. Postal Service the annual count of dog attacks inflicted on the nation’s hardworking, all-weather letter carriers. The number for the previous year comes out every spring, along with the perennial request that Americans be “responsible dog owners” by keeping their pets away from the men and women who deliver 162 million pieces of first-class mail each day. —
The USPS says 5,400 postal employees were attacked by dogs in 2021, and many attacks were by canines whose owners regularly claimed, “My dog won’t bite.”
Cleveland ranked No. 1 among cities in dog attacks, according to the USPS. I’m pleased to report that, in 2021, Baltimore dropped from 17th in the nation to 23rd.
A dog bite constitutes a long-standing danger for deliverers of the mail. But it’s not the only one.
“The U.S. Postal Inspection Service reports that robberies of postal carriers have increased by 78%, resulting in nearly 500 robberies in 2022,” says Rep. Kweisi Mfume of Maryland’s 7th District, the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce.
Mfume opened a committee hearing Wednesday on postal operations under Louis DeJoy, the Trump-backed postmaster general, who is, remarkably, still on the job. Just a couple of years ago, calls for DeJoy’s resignation were widespread, and the USPS was having all sorts of problems getting the mail delivered, a fraught situation in the 2020 election year. There was much speculation (and hope) that, once in office, President Joe Biden would find a way to replace DeJoy. Since then, however, DeJoy has apparently made some peace with members of Congress, including Democrats, by supporting USPS reforms. The Republican chairman of the committee DeJoy appeared before on Wednesday called him “the right man for the job.”
But Mfume wanted to know about the safety of the workforce, and for good reason.
According to the U.S. Postal Inspector Service, robberies of mail carriers have more than tripled, and robberies involving a gun have more than quadrupled in recent years. Weapons were used in most of the 496 robberies Mfume referenced. A Milwaukee letter carrier was shot to death, according to the Associated Press.
“Which I find absolutely amazing,” said Mfume. “Most of us grew up in an America where postal carriers were not being robbed.”
I had to stop there and ponder that bit of nostalgia. Mfume was born in 1948, making him a baby boomer. I believe he’s correct. Even as the country became more violent, even as sales of guns went through the roof, even as so much of this nation became a dysfunctional mess, the list of American depravities did not include stickin’ up the mailman. Certainly not to the extent we’re seeing now.
As Mfume pointed out in Wednesday’s hearing, postal carriers have become targets of criminals because of the “arrow keys” they carry to open collection boxes, outdoor parcel lockers and apartment panels.
According to the USPS, supervisors assign arrow keys to carriers on more than 300,000 daily routes across the country. Carriers and collectors are expected to keep them chained to their belts or clothing and return them at the end of each day.
“Criminals who commit robberies of letter carriers are specifically looking for arrow keys, which grant access to most mailboxes across an entire ZIP code associated with that key,” Mfume said. “This provides bad actors with ample opportunities to steal checks and rewrite them to withdraw excessive amounts from the victim’s bank account.
“I am concerned about the thousands of dollars that a single family could lose if a check is stolen [and] about the safety of our hardworking postal carriers targeted by senseless crime.”
A bank executive recently told me about a rash of such mailbox thefts on the north side of Baltimore. Just this week in Anne Arundel County, a guy with a gun held up a postal carrier for his mailbox key.
This problem has been around for a few years, but Mfume says Maryland is experiencing “one of the worst spikes in mail theft,” particularly in the Montgomery County communities of Bethesda, Potomac and Chevy Chase.
Last year, a federal grand jury indicted four people, all in their early 20s and one of them from Baltimore County, in the theft of mail in Bethesda. The quartet used stolen arrow keys, according to the indictment. Their arrests came in the midst of a broader investigation of crimes against postal carriers, including a series of 13 armed robberies.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the 8th District Democrat who represents Montgomery County, joined Mfume in asking DeJoy to come up with a plan for protecting postal carriers.
In a sign that it’s not as moribund as often believed, the Postal Service has started making collection boxes more secure and eliminating some of the thousands of arrow keys in use.
There were 38,500 thefts of mail from blue collection boxes in the 2022 fiscal year, so the USPS says it’s in the process of “hardening” 12,000 of them in “high security risk areas.”
As for the arrow keys, that antiquated system will eventually go away. For starters, the USPS says, it’s replacing the keys with 49,000 electronic locks, with more to come.
All good. But there’s a long way to go.
In the meantime, a message to bad guys and losers working the mail routes: Leave our postal carriers alone!
