The U.S. Postal Inspection Service recently announced another temporary “surge” operation — this time in Houston — in which Postal Inspectors were flown in from New York and Los Angeles to combat rising mail theft. According to reports, the operation resulted in two arrests at a blue collection box, the recovery of approximately 80 pieces of stolen mail, and the seizure of nine stolen Arrow keys.
On its face, the operation was a success. But it also exposed something far more significant: the fundamental contradiction at the center of the Postal Service’s current mail-theft strategy.
America is now flying postal inspectors out of cities already overwhelmed by mail theft to conduct temporary enforcement blitzes in other cities suffering from the exact same problem — all while the Postal Service continues to sideline the uniformed Postal Police Officers already stationed in those locations who once performed proactive street-level crime prevention as a routine function.
In other words, the Postal Service is attempting to surge its way out of a nationwide deterrence failure of its own making
Think about what it actually costs to fly a Postal Inspector from New York or Los Angeles to Houston. Round-trip airfare. A hotel room for two weeks. A rental car. Meals and per diem — every single day. Now multiply that by every inspector deployed. Then remember that this is happening repeatedly, in city after city, across the country — while Postal Police Officers who already live and work in those cities sit on the sidelines, collecting their salaries, doing none of this work. The Postal Service is paying twice: once for the officers it refuses to use, and again for the expensive out-of-town replacements it flies in to do the job those officers were trained to do. And at the end of it all, the inspectors pack their bags and go home — leaving the same criminal environment they found when they arrived.
And we wonder why the Postal Service is going broke?
External mail theft is no surprise. It’s the internal theft that has caused people to lose faith in the USPS and drive volume away. Radicals in labor have seen to it that individuals of questionable character are hired, often without drug tests or background checks, based solely on factors that meet their agenda. Just as in the rest of society, a minority of individuals are responsible for a majority of not only internal theft, but absenteeism as well. The USPS workforce has become a huge example of DEI failure.