Frank Albergo is the president of the Postal Police Officers Association.
Over the past two decades, the U.S. Postal Service has steadily dismantled its uniformed police force. The agency employed about 450 postal police officers last year, down from 1,400 in 2000 — a decline of nearly 70 percent.
In 2020, the agency went further, de-policing itself with a directive that limited officers to protecting Postal Service property. Proactive, street-level patrols designed to stop mail theft in real time were eliminated.
What followed was predictable: Letter carrier robberies surged by 845 percent nationwide between fiscal 2019 and 2023, from 64 robberies per year to more than 600. High-volume mail theft has skyrocketed 2,500 percent since 2010, with more than 52,000 reported cases in fiscal 2024, according to federal data obtained by the Postal Police Officers Association, the organization I lead.
To see the human cost, look at Marysville, Washington. In August 2023, thieves stole and copied a set of master keys that gave them access to thousands of group mailboxes and collection boxes across entire neighborhoods. Local media covered the breach. The Postal Service’s law enforcement arm launched an investigation. Then the story faded.
But the crime did not. Through 2024 and into 2025, mail theft in Marysville continued unabated. By spring 2026, thieves were hitting the same neighborhoods multiple times in the space of days — sometimes waving casually at residents while stealing their mail. Frustrated homeowners are now spending thousands of dollars on alarms, sensors and license plate readers, in effect privatizing a core public service.
Marysville is no anomaly. Mail theft is not just a sideshow in the United States’ fraud epidemic — it is a primary engine. In just six months in 2023, financial institutions reportedmore than $688 million in suspicious activity tied to mail-theft-related check fraud. That suggests annual losses of over $1 billion. The FBI has warned that stolen mail serves as a major access point for check fraud. Though exact totals are difficult to pin down because of underreporting, the pattern is unmistakable: The mailbox has become one of the most reliable gateways to some of the nation’s fastest-growing fraud schemes.
This is the unsurprising result of the Postal Service’s shift from prevention to reaction. When security is largely limited to after-the-fact investigations by postal inspectors, criminals face little immediate risk at the moment of opportunity. The postal system, which delivers paychecks, Social Security payments, tax documents, prescription medications and ballots to hundreds of millions of Americans, has been left dangerously exposed.
Trust in the U.S. mail is not a luxury. It underpins commerce, election integrity, the security of sensitive personal data and countless government services. Allowing frontline deterrence to erode while mail theft fuels downstream fraud costing billions of dollars is fiscally reckless and chips away at public confidence in a core institution at a time when trust in the federal government is already low.
Members of Congress have attempted to get postal police officers back on the streets with the bipartisan Postal Police Reform Act, as well as introduced bills to increase penalties for mail theft and develop a coordinated federal approach to the epidemic. It’s time for legislators to make efforts like these a priority.
The Postal Service must reverse course. That means restoring its police force to adequate staffing levels, expanding officers’ authority to target mail theft in high-risk areas, accelerating physical security improvements such as upgraded collection boxes and master key controls, and treating the protection of the mail with the urgency it demands.
The post America’s mail theft epidemic is going unaddressed appeared first on Washington Post.
