In 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.
