Did the U.S. Postal Service pave the way for surge in thefts by muzzling its own police?

As of late June, there are no more postal police working the day shift in Philadelphia, marking an end to “50 years of having postal police operations 24 hours a day,” union chief says.

The officers Albergo leads are the uniformed police who work with the better-known, higher-paid postal inspectors, the detectives of postal crime.

Or they did: There are just 450 postal police officers left in the U.S. That’s down 130 in the past three years, just half as many as in 2008, and one-sixth the number who patrolled the mail system in the 1970s. (There were around 2,100 postal inspectors in the late 1990s; there are now around 1,300.)