The visibility of response is not an aesthetic detail of policing; it is its essence. Image: Ceri Breeze/Shutterstock.com
By: Frank Albergo, Postal Police Officers AssociationIn 2020, the U.S. Postal Service benched its own uniformed police force. It was a quiet bureaucratic act — a memo few outside the agency ever saw — but it carried the weight of a paradigm shift. Law enforcement, once considered a public duty, became a cost center. And as Postal Police left the beat, a powerful crime deterrent had been removed.
Overnight, roughly 600 sworn Postal Police Officers (PPOs) were confined to postal property. They lost authority to patrol high-risk ZIP Codes, escort letter carriers, and respond to postal-related crimes in real time. Within months, robberies of mail carriers, theft of arrow keys, and large-scale mail-theft attacks surged. The system lost its feedback loop of deterrence — the invisible circuitry that once kept postal crime in check.
The decision, known as the Bowers Memo, was soon followed by a recommendation from Booz Allen Hamilton. In effect, the Postal Service had paid consultants to rubber-stamp the logic of postal austerity: recast essential postal functions as “support services” ripe for “cost efficiencies” and eventual privatization. The rationale was as simple as it was shortsighted — confine PPOs to postal property, and their duties could be outsourced to contract security guards. In that perverse logic, protecting the mail — one of the nation’s oldest public obligations — was reclassified as overhead.
When you mistake a duty for a budget line item, consequences follow with mechanical precision. The Postal Service didn’t just try to cut costs; it severed its own immune system. The visible, uniformed deterrence that once signaled order was replaced by glossy press releases and after-the-fact investigations.
Deterrence Replaced with Prosecution
The visibility of response is not an aesthetic detail of policing; it is its essence. Criminologist Daniel Nagin’s research shows that the certainty and swiftness of punishment — not its severity — drive deterrence. A uniformed officer arriving within minutes changes behavior in ways that prosecutions never will. When response time lengthens or uniforms vanish, the certainty of consequence evaporates. The result is “deterrence decay” — a slow-motion collapse of legitimacy and control. Applied to the Postal Service, the effect was immediate: Postal Inspectors investigate crimes after the fact; Postal Police Officers prevented them in real time. When those rapid-response patrols disappeared, so did the last visible signal that crime against the mail carried consequences.
Crime Follows a Curve, Not a Straight Line
Criminologists have long known that deterrence operates on a log-linear curve: small, steady doses of visible enforcement yield disproportionately large reductions in crime, while modest withdrawals cause disorder to spike. Deterrence is fragile. Once visibility falls below a threshold, offenders sense impunity and crime multiplies.
This isn’t conjecture. Before criminologists quantified it, the Inspection Service proved it when it created the Postal Police Force in 1970 to stop surging mail theft and robberies of letter carriers. The formula was simple: visibility equals deterrence. Low-level criminals don’t calculate probabilities; they react to what they see. A uniformed officer compresses the calculus of risk into one thought — “I might get caught.”
When that perception vanished, deterrence collapsed — and mail theft, carrier robberies, and key thefts surged. Yet instead of restoring prevention, USPIS mistook paperwork for policing by focusing on post hoc investigations alone.
The Science of Deterrence
Christopher Koper’s Hot Spot Policing study showed that short, unpredictable patrols — 10 to 15 minutes at a time — suppress crime long after officers leave. The unpredictability itself deters crime. Mark Kleiman’s tipping-point model explains why: once the perception of enforcement drops below a critical threshold, deterrence doesn’t fade — it collapses. Crime becomes self-reinforcing. Enforcement systems get “swamped.” Visibility is the variable that matters most.
Postal Police Officers once occupied that optimal zone — visible enough to sustain deterrence, flexible enough to do it efficiently. Their removal flipped the system from order to chaos.
Learn, Adapt, Prevent
Problem-Oriented Policing (POP), first advanced by criminologist Herman Goldstein, transformed law enforcement from reactive casework into proactive problem-solving. Built on the SARA model — Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment — POP emphasizes a continuous loop of learning, adaptation, and prevention. Its premise is simple: success is not defined by arrests or case closures but by the reduction or elimination of the underlying conditions that make crime possible.
Years before the concept became mainstream, the Postal Inspection Service exemplified it. In the now-defunct Postal Police Carrier Protection and Mail-Theft Prevention Programs, PPOs met with postal workers to review credible threats and map high-risk ZIP Codes and carrier routes. Patrols shifted accordingly, and postal-related street crime plummeted. These programs succeeded not through manpower but through adaptability — officers who listened, learned, and acted before harm occurred.
That quiet sophistication — proactive problem solving — vanished in 2020. The Inspection Service didn’t just remove patrols; it dismantled its own learning loop. What remained were case files — no visibility, no deterrence, no security.
The Broader Lesson
The Postal Service’s de-policing experiment exposes a deeper bias: institutions measure what’s easy to count. Arrests and convictions are visible; the crimes that never happen are invisible. Yet in any functioning enforcement system, non-occurrence is the highest metric of success.
What began as a cost-cutting stunt on the backs of a few hundred federal police officers has become a fiscal and moral fiasco. The savings were imaginary, but the costs are real — measured in victims and billions lost. Each crime and the viral headlines that follow erode confidence in the Postal Service’s reliability — the brand value that once set it apart from private couriers. In trying to save pennies, the Postal Service sacrificed the trust that was its true currency.
The “sanctity of the mail” was never meant to be a business transaction. It is a public covenant — a promise that every address in America can trust its government with the simple acts of communication and commerce. Every washed check, every stolen package, every lost identity, every fraudulent account takeover is the price of forgetting that promise.
Restoring the Postal Police Force is not nostalgia — it’s evidence-based governance. Deterrence is a public good, not a budget category. Re-empowering Postal Police Officers would do more than cut postal-related crime; it would tell every American that their government still takes the security of their mail — and their trust — seriously.
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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