OAKLAND — Mail carriers are being targeted for robbery across the Bay Area, but especially in Oakland, where the city’s intractable crime problem has left postal workers vulnerable to frequent muggings.
The trend, while rarely reported before the pandemic, has skyrocketed in the last couple years, with Oakland as a focal city along with Hayward, Stockton, Vallejo and Bakersfield, postal inspectors said.
“We used to have just a handful a year, and now going a week without a robbery in Oakland is refreshing,” said Matthew Norfleet, a postal service inspector who investigates mail-related crimes in the East Bay.
On a weekly basis — sometimes more than once a day — a mail carrier in the city is held up at gunpoint or otherwise threatened by a robber who snatches their postal keys, typically with the intention of returning at night to test them on apartment mailboxes in the neighborhood.
With dozens of unresolved cases, Oakland has seen more mail carrier robberies than any other Bay Area city, said Jeff Fitch, another local postal inspector who investigates mail-related crimes — a federal matter outside the jurisdiction of local police and courts.
Those who are caught face prosecution in federal court, which last fall sentenced a man to 51 months in prison for sticking up a woman mail carrier at gunpoint in a neighborhood near Lake Merritt. Another man was sentenced in late 2021 to six years in federal prison for a series of attempted and successful mail-carrier robberies around town.
In many cases, security footage from home cameras and eyewitness statements — including from residents who noticed a carrier was being followed — help secure convictions, inspectors said.
Since it’s keys that most robbers are out to steal, residents are encouraged by the postal service to pick up their mail as soon as it arrives, before anyone has a chance to steal it from the mailbox. Signature confirmation also goes a long way toward protecting important packages, officials said.
But there’s little the postal service can do beforehand to protect mail carriers, who often report fearing for their safety.
“Only so much protection is available — we can’t be with every carrier all the time,” Norfleet said. “I wish I could tell you we had a force field around carriers. They’re already working hard enough.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com