CommentsDEEGAN ON LA-Cattle rustling and Texas have been “pardners” in so many movies and stories about the wild west with thieves often brought to justice is a way that’s bigger than life, much like the Lone Star State itself.
Texas is thinking big again and may be setting an example for the Golden State and Los Angeles in how to deal with the theft of packages, stolen from people's front doors and building entries.
Increased package theft is a by-product of the home delivery services offered by Amazon and other online retailers that make shopping so easy. But the fate of those packages once they hit your home can be a problem: many are stolen and at year-end holiday time it’s almost an epidemic.
While Silicon Valley and social media have combined to give us new freedoms and methods of communication, including the ability to shop online, there are drawbacks that go with those benefits and one of them is package theft.
Suddenly, the convenience of overnight delivery of online purchases can turn into an inconvenience when there is an onsite theft from your front door. It's irritating and has spawned a new cottage industry of cameras installed at doorways, although knowing what your thief looks like does not lessen the loss. A video image is better than nothing for police, but without a facial recognition program, pursuing pixels may be a dead end.
What Texas has done to deal with their package theft problem is to criminalize it by passing Texas House Bill 37 which classifies the theft as either a misdemeanor or a felony depending on the number of packages stolen by a perpetrator.
Homer Hernandez, a San Antonio U.S. Postal Service letter carrier for over 15 years and the vice president of the Texas State Association of Letter Carriers says these thefts “happened a hell of a lot over the past few years. Almost every day.”
In Texas, a huge state that thinks big, the governor recently signed a bill passed by the state legislature that makes the theft of a letter, postal card, package, bag or other sealed article that is delivered or left to be collected (significantly, by any carrier, not just the USPS) and not yet received by the addressee, a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the number of addressees robbed of their mail or packages.
It’s a misdemeanor if mail or packages is appropriated from fewer than 10 addressees, a state jail felony for between 10 and 29 addressees, and a third-degree felony if the mail or packages are appropriated from 30 or more addressees. The new law will go into effect on September 1, 2019.
Will this penalty structure work? It relies heavily on the local police and sheriffs in Texas to round up the rustlers.
Publicizing California Penal Code Section 530.5(e) PC: Mail Theft could act as a deterrent here in California. While not at the felony level like Texas, a misdemeanor still creates some relief. Or perhaps our state could follow Texas’s example and enhance the law to create a felony level.
Just as signs indicating a house is patrolled by a security service can cause a burglar to go to the next block, could a sign warning that “stealing mail or packages may be a misdemeanor” be enough of a deterrent to make a package thief think about consequences?
Right now, one remedy available is a system of secured delivery sites from some of the biggest shipping services like Amazon and UPS. The biggest online retailer, Amazon, has what they call an Amazon Hub Locker. There is also a secured UPS delivery system called UPS Access Point™ Deliveries
Both systems have secured locations that accept your package delivery and notify you to retrieve it. There is no cost to the addressee, and the packages remain in a safe and secure environment.
The most recently published LAPD crime stats show that “personal and other theft” property crimes are up five percent between January and August. We are in an age of inequality, where the gap between those who have and those who want is wider than ever.
Will a new or enhanced law help? How about warning signs on the front door? There’s always secured delivery, possibly inconvenient but a guarantee of safety if the package is valuable. The motivation to steal -- to get something of value for free -- is ancient. Mitigating it can be modernized though some of these options.
(Tim Deegan is a civic activist whose DEEGAN ON LA weekly column about city planning, new urbanism, the environment, and the homeless appear in CityWatch. Tim can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.