The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) finally released its FY2024 Annual Report in January 2026 — more than 15 months after the fiscal year ended.
That’s not a minor administrative delay. It’s a transparency failure.
Postal customers and policymakers are being asked to trust a federal law-enforcement agency that could not timely report its own performance — during the worst postal crime wave in modern history. And despite the glossy presentation and “good news” statistics — like a 27% drop in letter carrier robberies and a 20% downtick in mail theft complaints — the underlying numbers tell a much different story.
USPIS has prioritized reactive investigations over proactive prevention, allowing known vulnerabilities to fester while criminals exploit the mail system with near impunity. This isn’t about mail thieves suddenly becoming criminal masterminds. It’s about policy choices. Prevention was sidelined. Deterrence was dismantled. And the public is paying the price. The cost of those choices is no longer abstract.
This gentleman does have an ax to grind as he represents the group being dismantled. What both he and the report leave out is the explosion in theft from within the USPS. Aggressive DEI initiatives coupled with relaxed hiring standards and lax background checks have resulted in large numbers of morally challenged employees, looking to steal.
I agree. But, the amount of time stolen by salaried employees is in the billions of dollars. Our PM has a second home in FL.
She goes there 2 weeks every month. Takes her laptop and “claims” she runs the office from there??
Seems to be the new flavor of the month. Everyone knows and
they look the other way????
I told her if she ever comes after to me I’ll go the local paper and drag her name through it.
Next day I got 5 scn 15 pices of mail. Screw Her!!!
And screw USPS!!!!
Career postal workers are overwhelmingly not responsible for mail theft or stolen or criminally misused arrow keys. However, the decision to hire over a hundred-thousand non-career postal workers has definately contributed to the mail theft crisis.
But what did USPS expect when it created a two-tier workforce that brought in tens of thousands of underpaid, temporary employees. Career postal employees who are vested in their positions are very unlikely to steal mail or sell (or rent) arrow keys — but a tempoarary employee has nothing to lose.
There are better ways to reduce labor costs than hiring thousands of underpaid non-career postal employees who ultimately increase operational inefficiency; increase absenteeism; increase employee turnover rates and require much more direct supervision (including policing).
From the USPS OIG’s Spring 2025 Semiannual Report to Congress:
“Among our findings was that internal mail theft was PREVALENT in processing facilities around the country.”
Meanwhile, the U.S Postal Inspection Service is busy touting a slight dip in letter carrier robberies as a victory for “Project Safe Delivery.” But the more likely explanation? Rising collusion between criminal groups and corrupt insiders. Why risk a robbery when you can just buy what you need from inside the system?
So just as mail theft exploded and internal conspiracies surged, the Postal Inspection Service quietly dismantled the Postal Police Force — cutting hiring, underfunding training, and failing to backfill resignations and retirements.
The result? In the face of the Mail Theft Epidemic, the Postal Service DE-POLICED itself. Brilliant.
How many op-ed does this guy have to write until someone listens. He has proven that the Postal Inspection Service is a scam. What else does congress need? Abolish the Inspection Service. it is a total waste of money.
Frank Albergo is a bitter former retired Postal Police Officer who has an axe to grind with the USPIS because during his time as the Postal Police Union President he tried to get 20 year law enforcement retirement for his people & failed because the Postal Police don’t do enough law enforcement. Postal Police do a vital job for the USPS in protecting postal employees and postal property. The Postal Police have the title of Police but they mostly do security work. At the end of their shifts Postal Police have to turn in their issued weapons; does that sound like what regular Police Officers do or more like a security guard?
All of Albergo’s opinion pieces are hit jobs to try to damage the USPIS. Albrego tries to portray the Postal Police as crime fighters but they are largely not, he will never post how many arrests the postal have made before they were “sidelined” because they virtually did none. Albrego’s argument is that the value of the Postal Police is that they prevent crime which is a measure no one can really see, just project. It’s like saying I sprayed elephant spray and it kept all of the elephants away from me while I was walking around downtown Manhattan. BTW there are less than 400 Postal Police nationwide, I doubt a force that small could make an impact that Albergo claims. What Albergo wants is to expand the Postal Police force and to get 20 year federal law enforcement retirement. Just an example of things Albergo will not say, in 2016, after the BLM shootings of police officers in Dallas TX, Postal Police Union told USPIS they were not leaving postal properties due to the shooting for their officers safety…. The Postal Police eventually went back to leaving postal property but really?
Do your own research and make your own mind up about this subject. I sure someone supporting Albergo or the Postal Police Union will call me names but I will take the slings and arrows because I hate to see opinion hit pieces put out there without a counterweight of a second opinion.
Oh good Max — this again. Let’s unpack this masterpiece of stupidity.
First, the “bitter retired PPO” trope. Always a crowd favorite. When facts get uncomfortable, attack the messenger. This isn’t about grudges — it’s about whether the claims being made are true — which they undoubtably are. The reason this debate keeps resurfacing is simple: the facts refuse to cooperate with the USPIS narrative being pushed.
Second, the arrest numbers that you keep bringing up.
The claim that Postal Police “virtually did none” of the law-enforcement work falls apart the moment attribution is explained.
For decades, Postal Police arrests were credited to postal inspectors who were home — in bed — sleeping in their pajamas. The postal police arrest numbers were never broken out. Not labeled separately. Simply rolled into postal inspector arrest totals.
So when Postal Police authority was gradually restricted in 2018 and then functionally sidelined in 2020 — the predictable result followed:
USPIS mail-theft arrest numbers plummeted:
Fiscal Year – USPIS Mail Theft Arrests
• FY1990 – 5,914
• FY1994 – 5,095
• FY1998 – 4,939
• FY2002 – 5,858
• FY2006 – 5,060
• FY2010 – 2,775
• FY2014 – 2,335
• FY2018 – 2,487 ⬅️ inflection point
• FY2019 – 2,078
• FY2020 – 1,622
• FY2021 – 1,511
• FY2022 – 1,258
• FY2023 – 1,382
These are not opinions. They are USPIS-reported statistics. The idea that arrests dropped because enforcement somehow improved defies logic. We are in middle of the worst postal crime in modern history — you moron.
Third, the “they turn in their guns” claim — which is simply false. PPOs do not turn in their firearms at the end of each. That talking point is decades out of date and proves you are a moron.
Fourth, the brilliant elephant-spray analogy. You must be a leftist to argue that uniformed police don’t deter crime.
USPIS itself measured postal police crime prevention effects for decades. Postal Police patrols produced consistent and significant reductions in theft and robbery. Calling deterrence “invisible” is stupid.
Fifth, the “there are only 400 PPOs” argument. That number is not evidence of ineffectiveness — it is evidence of attrition by policy choice to fund a broken USPIS law enforcement strategy that has failed. Look around — the mail is unsafe — but morons like you in the USPIS insist that everything is fine. It’s not.
Sixth, the 2016 Dallas reference. So you admit that PPOs were operating off-property — which makes you even dumber than I thought.
Bottom line:
1. When Postal Police were active and empowered, USPIS arrest numbers were consistently high.
2. When Postal Police were restricted and sidelined, those numbers collapsed.
3. For decades, Postal Police arrests were credited to Postal Inspectors — until Postal Police were removed from the street.
That is not opinion. That is historical fact.
I love how Maxine Steele goes into hiding every time facts are presented which directly contradict his blatant and deliberate nonsense. He’s a gutless wonder.
Maxipad Steele is at it again with his blatant USPIS brown-nosing and comments against postal police, the PPOA and Frank Albergo. Yet another in a long line of Maxine Steele’s triumphs of stupidity.
And similar to the falsified tracking of arrests comment by Harry Ballsdale, for decades, assaults against postal inspectors and postal police officers were tracked separately and were entered separately into the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. And, for DECADES, postal police were assaulted at a 10:1 ratio over postal inspectors. This somehow didn’t sit well with USPIS heirarchy who often claimed that the postal police position was not at all dangerous. Therefore, USPIS began combining the assaults as “Inspection Service assaults”–no longer separating the two distinct positions and highly disparate assault numbers.
Bottom line:
Whenever the USPIS has a need to doctor statistics, it simply places its big fat thumb on the proverbial scale.
Also, the fact that you are aware that Albergo has retired means you are either a current postal inspector or one of the many who after retirement continue to suck at the lucrative USPIS teat–doing little to nothing while lining your corrupt pockets.
Max Steele didn’t just miss the point — he accidentally explained the Postal Service’s racial and institutional bias in one sentence.
Max Steele dismisses Postal Police Officers as glorified security guards. What he actually did was perfectly articulate the assumption driving USPS policy for the past five years.
Mail theft is out of control. And through it all, USPS has kept its own sworn federal police sidelined — not because of ineffectiveness, not because of lawsuits, not because the law requires it — but because USPS lawyers decided PPOs might be too risky to trust with real policing.
Postal Police Officers — nearly 100% people of color — are treated as something less: questioned, infantilized, “protected” from the authority they exercised safely for decades.
Max Steele did not offer an argument. Instead — he gave us a racist diatribe which USPS policy mirrors almost word for word.
No evidence PPO patrols were ineffective. Just an assumption that this group of black and brown officers can’t be trusted the way the white postal inspectors can.
This is how institutional bias works in practice: not with slurs, but with “policy clarifications.” Not with accountability, but with quiet exclusion.