Reviving PPO patrols would transform Project Safe Delivery from a public-relations exercise into a genuine crime-prevention campaign, argues the author. Image: MBaker Photography / Shutterstock.com
By: Frank Albergo, Postal Police Officers AssociationThe U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is facing a mail theft crisis of historic proportions. In response, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) rolled out Project Safe Delivery in 2023 — touting it as the centerpiece of its crime-prevention strategy. Promoted in press releases and even spotlighted on USPS’s own Mailin’ It! podcast, officials boast of 16 surge operations in 10 cities, 600 stand-up talks, upgraded locks, higher rewards, and 2,700 arrests for mail-theft related crimes.
At first glance, it sounds like progress. But look closer, and Project Safe Delivery collapses into a case study in inefficiency, misplaced priorities, and missed opportunities.
USPIS Arrest Performance Falls to Historic Lows
During the podcast, USPIS admitted that 16 surge operations produced just 68 arrests — and even that number is padded. As the U.S. Attorney’s Office has acknowledged, Postal Inspectors can “claim” arrests without ever being present, simply by attaching themselves to cases handled by local law enforcement. Strip away the padding and USPIS only made 28 arrests that were truly federal — fewer than two per surge.
Even if one accepts the reported 2,700 arrests under Project Safe Delivery, the math still works out to barely one arrest per Inspector per year. No wonder USPIS mail theft arrests have collapsed to historic lows, plunging 44% since FY2018 — from 2,487 to only 1,382 in FY2023. By any serious measure, Project Safe Delivery is not a strategy. It is stagecraft.
Transparency has also collapsed. USPIS traditionally releases its Annual Report each July, detailing arrests, convictions, and case data. Yet as FY2025 comes to a close, the FY2024 report is still missing. Without that annual report, stakeholders cannot assess how many arrests translated into convictions or whether USPIS resources were properly aligned with its primary mission.
The silence raises obvious questions: Is USPIS withholding data that would reveal declining performance? Is Project Safe Delivery being propped up by padded statistics rather than meaningful results? The evidence certainly points in that direction. A telling example is the USPIS outreach campaign. Across two years, Postal Inspectors gave 600 stand-up talks that reached just 7,600 employees — less than 1% of the total USPS workforce.
And while USPIS boasts of “increasing rewards,” FOIA records expose the program to be little more than window dressing. In Chicago, “where attacks on letter carriers have reached crisis levels, seven years of reward posters (2018–2024) produced just $6,000 in payouts, an average of only $857 a year. Far from “paying dividends,” the USPIS reward program has had no meaningful impact on deterring or solving postal crimes.
As public awareness, Project Safe Delivery is negligible; as crime prevention, it is a failure.
USPIS Surges: A Traveling Roadshow of Waste
Nearly every surge has been staged in one of the 21 cities that already have Postal Police Officers (PPOs). Rather than redeploying those officers — fully trained, equipped, and already in place — USPIS pulled Inspectors out of their own divisions, all of which are also grappling with surging postal crime, and flew them across the country to perform routine duties once carried out by PPOs — at far greater cost and with far less effect.
Postal Inspectors cost twice as much as PPOs, but the real waste lies not just in salaries. Add airfare, hotels, rental cars, per diems, administrative overhead, and the lost opportunity of investigative cases left undone back home. Then pile on the public-relations machinery and statistical spin — needed to justify it all
Worse, the Inspection Service announces that its surge operations have ended. Needless to say, most police agencies do not broadcast to the criminals when their law-enforcement operations have ended. But the Inspection Service is different in that this agency appears to be more concerned with its public relations image than fulfilling its mission.
The result is a traveling, multi-million-dollar roadshow that drains investigative resources and weakens prevention everywhere it goes. Waste, dressed up as law enforcement.
Locks Do Not Stop Criminals
During the podcast, a USPS executive proudly described a new electronic lock on a blue collection box that resisted a break-in attempt just two days after installation. This was spun as a smashing victory. But did the criminals stop? Of course not. They most likely just moved to the nearest group of neighborhood cluster boxes and pried them open or burglarized a few post offices or smashed windows of USPS delivery vans — to steal mail there. Confusing hardware for deterrence is a costly mistake. Electronic locks do not stop criminals; they redirect them.
Postal Inspectors at Sporting Events, Not Crime Scenes
If Project Safe Delivery feels like crime-prevention theater, a just-released USPS Office of Inspector General’s audit report explains why. The OIG found that USPIS has walked away from its core mission — fighting mail theft and protecting postal workers — so that Inspectors could staff sporting events as mail-screening security guards.
Between FY2022 and FY2024, the OIG found that USPIS mail theft and robbery cases fell 74%, while inspector workhours devoted to those crimes plummeted by 89%. At the very moment postal crime was exploding, Inspectors logged more than 28,000 hours at the Super Bowl, NBA All-Star Game, PGA golf tournaments, and even the NFL’s operations center — racking up more than $2.2 million in costs for events deemed “overstaffed and unnecessary.”
The audit also revealed systemic failures. USPIS operated without measurable performance standards, took credit for initiatives it did not control, and saw nine of its sixteen divisions miss national goals. Perhaps most troubling, the agency has still not completed the required national reviews of Inspector and Postal Police Officer staffing — leaving its resources misaligned with actual crime trends. This is not a new problem; the OIG flagged the same deficiency a quarter-century ago, and yet it persists.
When pressed, USPIS leadership dismissed four of five OIG recommendations — even rejecting its own workhour and caseload data as “not reliable indicators” of resource allocation. In the upside-down world of the Inspection Service, inspector workhours are not indicative of what Inspectors are actually working on. The absurdity speaks for itself.
So, carriers were being robbed at gunpoint at unprecedented levels, billions were siphoned through mail-related check fraud, and criminals looted the mail-stream — while USPIS kept Postal Police Officers benched and allowed Inspectors to enjoy sporting events. And USPIS leadership has the audacity to defend it all.
Local Police Fill the Void
Local law enforcement has taken notice. At a July 23 House Oversight Committee hearing, St. Petersburg Police Chief Anthony Holloway testified that mail theft case files “would just sit — there would just be a report number waiting for someone to look at it” until his department embedded a single detective as a Task Force Officer (TFO) with USPIS. Only then were check fraud and mail theft complaints investigated with suspects identified, pursued, and arrested.
The message is clear: TFOs are not a USPIS success. TFOs are a testament to local police intervention compensating for USPIS inaction.
A Fixable Problem
For too long, Project Safe Delivery has amounted to little more than press releases, podcasts, and surge deployments that yield few arrests and no lasting deterrence. The path forward is neither complicated nor out of reach. It lies entirely within the Postal Service’s control.
For half a century, Postal Police Officers patrolled high-risk Zip codes, deterring mail theft, escorting carriers, and securing collection points as part of their everyday duties. This was their mission — and they performed it effectively. Imagine if the Inspection Service returned PPOs to the very work they had successfully carried out for decades.
Uniformed PPOs — sworn federal law enforcement officers — could again patrol the neighborhoods hit hardest by mail theft. They could escort letter carriers along vulnerable routes, protect collection points identified by crime analytics, and provide the visible deterrence criminologists have shown reduces crime. Their presence would not only reassure the public but also ensure threats to the mail are confronted in real time.
The infrastructure already exists. PPOs are trained, equipped, and on the payroll. With real-time crime mapping and integrated communications, they could coordinate seamlessly with Postal Inspectors and local police. That kind of partnership — combining personnel, technology, and intelligence — would multiply effectiveness. It would also save millions by avoiding the airfare, hotels, and per diems of costly surge operations, while freeing Inspectors to focus on the investigations that actually require their expertise.
Reviving PPO patrols would transform Project Safe Delivery from a public-relations exercise into a genuine crime-prevention campaign. With Postal Police once again on the streets, the message would be unmistakable: your mail, your carrier, and your trust are being protected every day, in every community.
The American people deserve more than stagecraft. They deserve a Postal Inspection Service that takes its mission seriously. For the new Postmaster General, restoring Postal Police patrol authority is not just a fix — it is one of the most fixable challenges the Postal Service faces. And the payoff would be enormous: fewer thefts, safer carriers, and renewed confidence in the sanctity of the U.S. Mail.
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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