On August 7, Postmaster General David Steiner went before the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to warn of what he called a “continuing and urgent financial crisis.” He came armed with numbers and a clear message: the Postal Service needs higher prices, congressional help, and billions in new investment to survive. Yet he never mentioned the postal crime wave eroding revenue, driving up costs, and undermining the public trust on which the Postal Service’s business depends.
The Postal Service, he said, ran $600 million better this quarter than the same quarter a year earlier. A Postal Regulatory Commission ruling on the timing of rate increases will cost it $700 million. Shifting a price increase from July to January could be worth $600 to $800 million. A congressional ZIP Code proposal could cost more than $800 million. USPS needs new borrowing authority to address over $20 billion in historical underinvestment. And absent action from Congress, he warned, the Postal Service “may have to close thousands of unprofitable post offices and cut service.”
Stupid question. Either the Postal Inspection Service should rebuild its uniformed police force or the Postal Service should eliminate the Inspection Service. The Postal Inspection Service has proven that it cannot stop mail theft without a functioning Postal Police Force. Let’s stop wasting money. The Postal Service cannot afford its own law enforcement agency if that agency is utterly useless. That much is obvious.
At some point, a policy failure becomes difficult to explain away.
For six years, the Postal Service has defended a security strategy that largely removed its uniformed police officers from the places where postal crime actually occurs. During that same period, mail theft exploded, letter carriers were robbed at historically high levels, Arrow Keys became criminal currency, and hundreds of thousands of customers reported stolen mail. Yet the debate continues as though the role of visible policing were some unresolved theoretical question.
It is not. Investigators investigate crimes. Uniformed police deter them, interrupt them, and respond while they are happening. Cameras, electronic locks, prosecutions, and hardened mailboxes may all have a role, but none of them creates a police presence at the moment and place a crime is likely to occur.
The remarkable thing is not that the Postal Service tried a different approach in 2020. Institutions make bad decisions. The remarkable thing is that, six years and an extraordinary amount of evidence later, we are still debating whether visibly policing known crime locations might help prevent crime. Of course it does.