From wheeling cart loads of stolen merchandise out of a Burlington store in California to swiping a package out of a FedEx driver’s hands, thieves in America are growing bold.
The most recent account of a porch pirate stealing a package comes out of Chesterfield County, Virginia, WBOY reported. The thief stole a box containing a $1,600 iPad from the hands of a delivery driver.
Ring footage shows the suspect walking beside the delivery driver on the sidewalk of Jessica Saenz’s home, then snatching the package out of the FedEx worker’s hands. The thief then runs across the lawn toward his white BMW parked on the side of the road and drives off.
“I was in a meeting, and then the FedEx lady started knocking on my door, like, really hard,” Saenz told the news outlet. “I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’”
Neighbor Johnny Eubanks told WBOY he saw the incident while walking his dog.
“People are pretty desperate,” Eubanks said.
For some cities, like Seattle, theft has become such an issue that the United States Postal Service temporarily halted delivery for an entire zip code, Breitbart News reported.
The United States Postal Service announced robberies of mail carriers are 50% higher than last year, KIRO 7 reported. Robberies have more than quadrupled in the last decade, with criminals targeting Arrow and Modified Arrow Lock (MAL) Keys, Fortune reported. USPS is currently in the process of replacing 49,000 of the arrow lock keys with electronic versions to deter criminals from robbing mail carriers.
While mail thefts are on the rise, the Council of Criminal Justice found that residential and nonresidential burglaries have fallen in the first half of 2023 compared to the first half of last year.
“Robberies fell by 3.6%, residential burglaries by 3.8%, nonresidential burglaries by 5%, and larcenies by 4.1%,” the council reported.