The collapse of visible deterrence has left both postal employees and the public increasingly vulnerable. Image: imagean/iStock
By: Frank Albergo, Postal Police Officers AssociationWhen most Americans think of a data breach, they imagine hackers halfway around the world slipping through firewalls and stealing millions of records from corporate servers. But another breach — just as damaging and far more visible — is happening every day on our own streets. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) has the legal authority to stop it, yet for the past five years the agency has failed to act.
This breach isn’t digital. It’s physical. And it’s emptying America’s mailboxes.
Mail theft today is not simply about a few missing letters. As Professor David Maimon, Director of the Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Research Group at Georgia State University, has written, mail theft has become a large-scale compromise of sensitive information. Each piece of stolen mail — a check, a bill, a tax return, a bank statement — fuels identity theft, account takeovers, and other forms of financial fraud. In effect, these thefts are data breach events: physical intrusions into the nation’s mail stream, on par with corporate cyberattacks.
A New Scale of Crime
The scale is staggering. In FY2024, the Postal Service recorded over 52,000 high-volume mail theft attacks — up 156% since FY2019, and an astonishing 2,238% since FY2010. The Postal Service is already on track for another 50,000 attacks in FY2025. These aren’t petty crimes; they are coordinated, high yield strikes on mail in USPS custody, targeting everything from blue collection boxes and green relay boxes to neighborhood cluster box units, apartment panels, postal trucks, loading docks, and even letter carrier pushcarts.
Criminals are now targeting the points in the delivery chain where the most mail can be stolen at once — and each attack unleashes a cascade of financial losses and identity theft — putting both individuals and businesses at long-term risk.
The downstream effects have been massive. In 2024 alone, financial institutions filed more than 682,000 Suspicious Activity Reports related to check fraud — a 139% increase compared to 2020. A 2024 Federal Reserve survey showed that check fraud now accounts for 30% of all fraud losses, second only to debit card fraud. And between February and August 2023, Americans lost more than $688 million to mail theft-related check fraud.
The scope of the problem becomes even clearer when looking at stolen government payments. In just three months of 2024, Professor Maimon’s team catalogued more than $485 million in stolen U.S. Treasury checks for sale online. His analysis of Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) Suspicious Activity Reports shows a direct link: spikes in mail theft are followed by surges in identity theft. Each stolen check is not just a negotiable instrument — it’s a data-rich artifact that spawns multiple fraud schemes.
While businesses and banks often absorb much of the financial loss, the public pays the lasting price through damaged credit, lost savings, and a steady erosion of trust in one of America’s oldest and essential institutions: the U.S. Mail.
The Policy Breakdown
Until August 2020, USPIS had an answer: its own uniformed federal police force — Postal Police Officers (PPOs). For 50 years, PPOs patrolled high-risk areas, guarded collection points, and escorted carriers on dangerous routes. They were the only law enforcement officers in the nation dedicated solely to real-time protection of the U.S. Mail.
Then, without public debate, an unnamed USPS lawyer restricted PPO jurisdiction to postal facilities. Overnight, the Postal Service benched its only proactive patrol force, just as mail theft and assaults on postal workers were spiking.
USPIS now defends this policy choice as if it were their own — even though it was handed down from above — claiming it would be “impracticable” to patrol 230,000 delivery routes. Yet no one is suggesting that PPOs patrol every route. Quite frankly, the notion is prima facie ridiculous. PPOs are assigned to 21 major metropolitan areas — the very cities where most postal-related crimes occur. In fact, these 21 cities accounted for: 58% of robberies in 2020, 58.2% in 2021, and 43.6% in 2022. Even in 2023, with mail theft expanding, over one-third of letter carrier robberies occurred in those same cities — where PPOs were assigned but banned from patrolling.
The USPIS claim also rests on a flawed premise: “If PPOs can’t prevent crime everywhere, they shouldn’t prevent it anywhere.” Following that logic, no police agency should concentrate resources in crime hotspots, and USPIS ought to abandon facility security altogether simply because PPOs are not stationed in every single postal building. Crime prevention resources are always limited. The question is not whether PPOs can be everywhere, but whether they can be strategically deployed to where most of the postal-related crime is actually occurring.
Deterrence Works
Targeted deterrence works. The “Koper Curve” shows that short, randomized patrols in high-crime areas significantly reduce crime. This is settled criminology. PPOs are already in those hot spots but banned from patrolling.
Deprived of its frontline deterrent, USPIS has shifted almost entirely to reactive investigations. That approach may solve a handful of cases after the fact, but it does nothing to prevent the next high-volume mail theft attack from occurring. Predictably, mail theft has escalated, attacks on postal workers have grown more violent, and criminal networks have become more organized. The collapse of visible deterrence has left both postal employees and the public increasingly vulnerable.
What USPIS lacks is not manpower — it is a coherent law enforcement strategy.
What makes the Postal Service’s posture even more indefensible is that the federal government deploys uniformed forces — including the National Guard in Washington, D.C. — when public safety is at stake. Yet somehow the Postal Service insists that it does not have the authority to deploy its own federal police force to confront an epidemic of mail theft.
Bureaucratic Groupthink Meets Street-Level Crime
How could the Inspection Service defend a policy so clearly at odds with their mission? The answer lies not in incompetence but in the internal dynamics of large bureaucracies. Once a leadership team reaches consensus — especially under the banner of “modernizing” or “streamlining” — the political cost of reversing course can outweigh even overwhelming evidence of failure. Admitting error risks undermining authority while doubling down signals loyalty and unity.
The result is groupthink: dissent is costly, narratives harden, and decisions that once seemed “temporary” calcify into long-term policy — even dogma. The belief that Postal Police belong inside buildings has become self-reinforcing, even as the historical data show that visible, proactive postal police patrols reduce postal crime — significantly.
The Postal Service is now living with the consequences of this bureaucratic entrenchment: five years of missed opportunities to protect postal workers, deter mail theft, and reassure Americans that their mail is safe. This is not just a misstep in law enforcement strategy. It is a cautionary tale about how smart people, operating within an insular institution, can cling to bad ideas long after reality has rendered them indefensible.
The Way Forward
Congress has taken notice. The Postal Police Reform Act (H.R. 2095) would restore patrol authority to Postal Police and re-establish deterrence. That means PPOs could once again protect postal workers, secure mailboxes, and disrupt theft before stolen information floods into the identity-theft pipeline.
Restoring the Postal Police Force’s authority is not about nostalgia. It’s about re-adopting a proven model that meets today’s crisis head-on. Congress and the American people should not accept an era where armed robberies of letter carriers are routine, mail is being stolen by the pound, and stolen checks — along with the personal data they contain — circulate through criminal markets by the tens of thousands.
Every day that Congress fails to act, more Americans lose their savings, their credit, and their trust. The U.S. Mail remains one of the nation’s most important public services. But public trust will not survive if the agency charged with protecting it refuses to confront — and correct — its most obvious, most fixable security failure.
Every stolen letter is more than a lost piece of mail — it is the seed of identity theft and financial fraud. Without reform, the breach will keep growing.
Restore the Postal Police Force. Put Postal Police Officers back on the street. And seal America’s most ignored data breach.
Frank Albergo is the current national president of the Postal Police Officers Association (PPOA). The PPOA represents uniformed police officers employed by the United States Postal Inspection Service.
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