In NYC you MUST register with USPS, UPS, and FedEx for delivery notifications. Delivery folks won't even bother ringing your bell and will often skip getting the signature even if it's required because they face constant pressure to deliver more in less time from the company. You need the electronic notification to know it's there and you need to get there immediately as thieves will follow delivery trucks/personnel around the neighborhood, stealing after each delivery.
>In NYC you MUST register with USPS, UPS, and FedEx for delivery notifications
That's just not true. As long as you have a tracking number, you can get delivery notifications without registering simply by requesting them on the relevant websites.
I do that all the time.
>You need the electronic notification to know it's there and you need to get there immediately as thieves will follow delivery trucks/personnel around the neighborhood, stealing after each delivery.
That may happen where you live, but where I live (10025), that's not even close to the truth. There are often at least a half-dozen packages in my lobby (no doorman) at any given time and package theft is rare.
We had a problem with that a few years back, but when I called the police and then loudly told the likely perpetrators (and reminded them about the video cameras in the lobby), that stopped pretty quickly.
Want to do the same? Here's a shocking idea -- talk to your neighbors. Make sure there's surveillance (not that invasive Amazon Ring stuff) where packages are left, and make sure folks know they're being watched.
What's more, it would only take one person to be arrested (because the thieves are likely people you see every single day) for this to make it stop in your building.
Having a community makes a difference. Perhaps you should try it sometime?
> Having a community makes a difference. Perhaps you should try it sometime?
I'm familiar with the 'it doesn't affect me so you must be doing something wrong' attitude. And the dig about me not having a community... was that necessary?
Citywide package theft rates are up. Calling the police only works in a district that effectively deals with it. We don't bother in our neighborhood anymore because the police don't do anything about it. Most folks in my neighborhood have no lobby at all and the packages are left on their doorstep. Our "lobby" is large enough to open the outer door into and that's about it. It has no security, nor can we get any as our building owner doesn't want to deal with it. And I know my neighbors. They knew when we recovered from Covid-19 so we could help them with stuff since we had antibodies. They know I have Naloxone if any of them have an opioid emergency. And the super knows I have more tools than him so he can borrow them when he needs to. I helped him with the recycling the other day because his back was out.
Remember, not everyone has the same experience as you and not everyone has the same resources at their disposal as you.
>I'm familiar with the 'it doesn't affect me so you must be doing something wrong' attitude. And the dig about me not having a community... was that necessary?
I apparently didn't express myself very clearly, as I wasn't blaming you (or anyone other than the thieves) for anything. What's more, talking about creating community wasn't a dig at you either.
If I came across that way, please accept my apologies.
The primary points I wanted to make (as they were apparently obscured by my prose) were:
1. Most folks who are going to be stealing packages are those who live in your neighborhood, and if you've lived there a while, you probably have at least an inkling as to who those folks are.
2. Working with your neighbors to make sure those folks (accusations are unnecessary) are aware that people are watching and willing to take action (it's not really important whether or not the police actually do anything proactive, but that they will be involved and evidence in the form of video will be available) when such activity occurs.
>Remember, not everyone has the same experience as you and not everyone has the same resources at their disposal as you.
That's true in so many ways. I'd point out that the problem in my building was successfully addressed without the cooperation of the building management (in fact, they posted a sign in the lobby stating that they will take absolutely no responsibility for any thefts). Rather it was done by specifically addressing the issue with those most likely responsible for the thefts.
Whether or not that can or will be successful everywhere is questionable. However, it's better than doing nothing IMHO. I am most certainly not implying that you (or anyone else) are "doing nothing."
That hasn't been my experience. Everyone rings the bell except the USPS, who has a key to let themselves in. Many years ago, something being shipped by Lasership means you'd never get it, but they seem to have improved on that front.
Anecdotal but I don't think packages get stolen in my neighborhood. I occasionally read Nextdoor and it never comes up. And my neighbors complain about everything.
It happens in my neighborhood regularly. It gets talked about on Nextdoor and on our subreddit often as well. It varies by block. Ours has been better lately but was a lot worse mid-2020.
Roughly in the same timeline, porch pirates have been rampant in my community (in the SF Bay Area nevertheless!) and causing a lot of headache for me and my neighbors (at least those in our chat group).
It seems to me that these CRIMINALS face little to no consequences here, both absolute and relative to the damage they are causing. The so-called police is willing and capable to do exactly nothing about it. Any confrontation either hurts the resident, or puts the (otherwise perfectly legal) resident under legal trouble... Which is weird, because this effectively means that the victim faces more risk than even the perpetrator, just by the virtue of having an address and living a proper, productive life!
In the end I can't help but feel they are the predator and we are the prey. And the rest of the society is, uh, pretty content with the status quo?
Lived in Singapore, Caning is absolutely barbaric and an atrocious way of punishment.
They have special people who are trained in caning and the culprit will get their 30 lashes or whatever regardless of whether they pass out at lash 19 say. They'll heal you up and back you go for the next 11 lashes.
This is what they did in medieval times, not today. Singapore is barbaric in this aspect and this is enforced in middle schools as well. It turns kids into obedient robots.
Whatever solution is proposed, caning is not one of them.
the conversation on this thread is bizarre and concerning.
It's stuff...it's literally stuff! The lead example is a blazer...
That commenters are willing to permanently disfigure people because their blazer, or table leg is taken speaks to a lack of seeing others as human. I somehow think their would be an entirely different conversation about appropriate punishment if the article was about fraud or misconduct by the landlords, or centered the article on the landlords not providing reasonable service. my last apartment complex had universal package delivery lockers as a service. This is a totally solvable problem, the landlords are just cheap and as a result lets beat people.
The other comment thread of 'you may well have your statistics but I have an opinion and anecdotes' is just exemplary of why this country has the justice system it does.
Theft isn't a crime against stuff, it's a crime against the person whose stuff was taken. Stuff represents plans (supplies), freedom (means of transport), abilities (tools), and connections (devices).
Your quote is not literal. Here is the more relevant literal quotes:
"""
You may very well have statistics, but these statistics may very well be false, especially when it comes to including figures that represent quality of life (i.e. how anxious you are on a constant basis with respect to your property or being assaulted).
...
But, as it says in this very New York Times article, package theft goes completely unreported and is therefore not part of your statistics. Likewise, sexual assaults in subways are only very recently being tracked in New York.
I don't understand this kind of perspective. You ate completely olivipus to the root of the problem: why would mail carriers even leave parcels on the porch or similar?
In most (all?) European countries the rule is that they ring the bell, if you don't answer they leave a note and either leave it with a neighbour, come back a day later, or you have to pick it up from the post office. In addition nowadays you can ask to get mail delivered to a specific kind of locker (operated by the mail service) where you can pick it up any time of day.
Really, such a weird perspective to want to reintroduce capital punishment rather than force the companies to use one of the many available solutions. You have accepted that the legal burden is on you, rather than the carrier paid to get the package to you - which is just absurd.
By contrast, in Texas the law allows you to use lethal force to protect your property.
You can literally shoot someone in the back as they run away with your amazon package if you have no other reasonable way to prevent your property from theft.
I'd assume your point would be dramatically more sympathetic if you used the term "Implied thief" - while theft is wrong, turning residents into judge, jury, and executioner sounds insane to me.
I wouldn't even expect this to be limited to the truly insane citizens of Texas - simply an aggressive one that doesn't see their package and sees you leaving with what must (in their mind) be their property
Didn't expect that last line ("BTW") but to be honest, I think something like that is the only solution.
If you look at society 400-500 years ago, brutal punishment of this variety was the norm: theft in Restoration England was often enough met with hanging. Since then, the penalties for theft and other "petty" crimes have been reduced, to the point that now theft has been completely normalized. People complained, for example, when charges against Amy Cooper were dropped in New York, but the fact is that you can get arrested hundreds of times in New York, and your charges will always be dropped, for basically any charge, theft, assault, domestic violence, you name it, they drop it. There is a total unwillingness by people in power to inflict punishment on people who punish ordinary citizens by committing crimes against them, sending the signal committing crime is not at all, in fact, criminal, but normal, expected and acceptable behavior. Non-criminal people will flee such environments en masse or become criminals themselves. The result will be lawless cities that blowhards like Trump talk about but do nothing to fix, and only make worse.
I am not saying we should go back to hanging people for theft. But we do need to figure out how to punish people without maintaining the Prison Industrial Complex. We need to figure out what is a crime (theft) and not a crime (drug use), we need to provide social services, food, shelter to poor people. We MUST provide education and opportunities to people. But if crime goes unpunished, perhaps in an asymmetric manner like caning, the lawlessness we're seeing today will grow much, much worse and make basic life unlivable in places that were once and still maybe are the pinnacles of civilization, like New York. It will destroy us.
It's hard to square this comment with the simple fact that property crime is, in the United States, currently much less common than it has been in decades.
This data is from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which directly asks respondents if they have been the victim of a crime, and is not based on police reports or prosecutions.
The same decline has also been seen in violent crime, and is actually one of the major unanswered questions in modern criminology: why has crime declined by about half since 1990? There are many theories (you've probably seen the theories involving lead or pollution exposure) but no definitive answers. But whatever the explanation may be, it does not justify brutal punishment, since (a) crime is declining, not increasing, and (b) I'm not aware of any substantial evidence showing a major deterrent effect of severe prison sentences or even capital punishment.
I can tell you here in SoCal, people simply don't call the police any longer for crimes like this. There are no longer any consequences for low level thievery in California. This sort of thing is rampant in my area, along with other crimes and the criminals know the police won't do anything about it. A lot of this is due to Prop. 47, which basically doesn't allow for enforcement of property crimes under $1000 value. Businesses have been complaining about this too; gangs target stores and have people steal items that stay under the $1000 limit and they act with impunity. Violent crime is also up in my area, we have been averaging of one shooting a night. This is why so many people have been leaving the state in the last few years. I remember reading about some higher end electronic shop in SF shutting down due to the robberies that were happening far too often.
You may very well have statistics, but these statistics may very well be false, especially when it comes to including figures that represent quality of life (i.e. how anxious you are on a constant basis with respect to your property or being assaulted).
Yes, home burglaries are usually reported and tracked in data. But, as it says in this very New York Times article, package theft goes completely unreported and is therefore not part of your statistics. Likewise, sexual assaults in subways are only very recently being tracked in New York. Why did you choose, by the way, to assume I was only talking about property crime? The types of crimes not tracked by NYPD is vast, and such crime I have seen escalating year over year.
Stats are stats, but if you live in New York, you notice how 10 years ago people didn't rob Walgreens, and now they rob it all the time practically on an on-going basis. You just take what you need and walk past "security." See some boxes inside a vestibule? They're yours. But it's not just property crime, it's all crime.
As I said, "This data is from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which directly asks respondents if they have been the victim of a crime, and is not based on police reports or prosecutions." The NCVS results, as far as I am aware, match every other attempt to estimate the prevalence of crime over time. They are also consistent across property crime, violent crime, and other types.
You may be noticing these issues more, but that's because you're older and have seen more examples over the years, and perhaps have gotten more invested in your community -- not because they are universally more common across the country.
I didn't say they were universally more common across the country. I am talking about my experience with living in New York. I am talking about seeing people constantly masturbating in the subway, having not seen that 10 years ago when I moved to New York. I am sure I would have noticed that.
If you take the stats you cite as truth, I don't know how you square these stats with the contents of the original post itself.
As you know, stats represent a sample. Beyond the sample, there is reality.
>Stats are stats, but if you live in New York, you notice how 10 years ago people didn't rob Walgreens, and now they rob it all the time practically on an on-going basis. You just take what you need and walk past "security." See some boxes inside a vestibule? They're yours. But it's not just property crime, it's all crime.
I've lived pretty much my whole life in New York City (54 years) and it's safer and better than it's ever been.
Sure, there is crime. But things are so much better than they've been in my lifetime that your complaints ring really hollow to me.
I could recount countless episodes of violence, criminal activity and general bad behavior over the past 45 years or so (with the police certainly not excluded from those. Not by a long shot), but I won't bother. The statistics speak for themselves.
I've had my packages stolen a few times. And if the lazy, rapacious, scumbag managing agents for my apartment building cared to do their jobs, the person(s) (there are several known to me who almost certainly are responsible), would have been identified through the video cameras (I used to have access to them, but that was removed when the building was sold 8 years ago or so) and arrested. And that would be a strong deterrent.
Not sure where you live (although I'd be surprised if you actually lived in NYC given your seeming lack of knowledge about conditions here), but you're flat wrong and have provided exactly zero evidence to support your inaccurate pronouncements.
.. has everybody forgotten the massive protests over the police killing peope last year? Or that the US already imprisons more people per capita than any other country, including failed states like El Salvador and dictatorships like Turkmenistan?
The solution is not more violence. I suspect the problem is that the police have failed at the basic business of connecting crime to punishment, so they roam neighbourhoods looking for people they deem suspicious and dishing out punishment. So you get injustice and crime.
I haven't had packages stolen here, because if no one answers the doorbell, the delivery person will personally call you and ask if they can leave the packet with a neighbor.
Sometimes they call you before going on route and ask you if the delivery address is ok or if you would like it to be delivered to an alternate address (like your office/neighbour).
Did you read my comment wherein I specifically reject the notion that we need to perpetuate in Prison Industrial Complex? It's an incredible burden on our civilization and must be dismantled.
I think the problem is you have people who grow up in violence and only know violence. If we have a society that successfully educated people, kept people from falling through the cracks and provided them with opportunities, violence wouldn't be necessary. But for how many generations has our society failed people? How many generations have the failed, neglected people in our society grown up only knowing violence as something to be respected? Two? Three? Four generations? The question in my mind is whether even violence will deter people, which I am not certain of. But certainly prison doesn't deter anybody.
The only real answer, obviously, is education. But education is almost beyond repair at this time.
Well, American society was not merely failing people but formally excluding them until the moon landings. You talk about education; some of the Southern states shut down their education system entirely for a year rather than accept integration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_resistance
If you want a solution to the spiral of violence, http://www.svru.co.uk/ were hugely effective as an intervention carrot-and-stick approach.
Because right now, had the thieves been caught AND prosecuted, they would have to be put in jail, which is Known in the State of California to be Undesirable (/s, but not /s). This, plus the legislation that any theft < $950 is a misdemanor, means that the police never bother going after them.
OTOH, if the alternative is instant corporal punishment (without clogging up the lines at the jail), then perhaps the laws can actually be enforced?
My advice: lobby for stronger personal stimulus from congress. It's hardly a mystery why this is happening.
Also if you think you're being preyed upon: you're hanging out on a forum with millionaires. This forum is far more predatory than porch theft ever could be. It's only a quirk of fate that our grift is legal and theirs is not.
Wow that 43% of people who get online orders have experienced a theft seems super high to me.
I'm trying to think of the lowest tech solution to this that would work. Maybe plexiglass lockboxes that are secured to the floor but left unlocked. Package delivery workers can put them in the boxes with little effort (important or won't be done) but only residents can open them up.
There isn't a solution really. Drivers are paid too little to care and have to deliver too many packages - leading to mistreatment of a package and lack of time to knock and wait for the owner.
You could maybe have an option to register with distributors to not deliver your packages but keep them in the centers and only send you a not that you can collect package. But that kind of defeats a purpose of delivery :/
>There isn't a solution really. Drivers are paid too little to care and have to deliver too many packages - leading to mistreatment of a package and lack of time to knock and wait for the owner.
The ultimate highlight of this was a rug that UPS told me was delivered to my home. I received the alert on my phone and went outside to try to find it, but couldn't. I wasn't too worried because it wasn't unusual for UPS to report packages as delivered up to 30 minutes before they actually arrived. (Yes, this happened more than once)
About 25 minutes later, I received a call from a gentleman a couple miles away. He was washing his car when the UPS truck sped by and hit a bump, causing my rug and a couple boxes to fall out of the back and into the middle of the road (it was one of the hottest, most humid days of the year). Fortunately, my phone number was on the shipping label.
I'm actually a little bit shocked that people are this naive. You should try to ship virtually everything to either an Amazon locker or a workplace or somewhere with a concierge. This theft of packages is absolutely rampant throughout every major metropolitan in the U.S. If your package is going to be dropped off casually somewhere, it had better have inexpensive contents.
Sorry but no, this rate of package theft is not the norm around the globe and law abiding citizens should not have to take such measures. Government needs to find a solution.
And no, people are not this naive. Don't belittle them. That's just victim blaming.
I agree that this isn't how things should be, but it clearly is. And with the way our politics are going in Democrat-run cities, I don't see this problem getting any better, unless we'll start to have even more places to ship our packages to. Right now, Amazon has clearly done the best job with this. My guess is that one "solution" to this might be a semi-public set of lockers - much like Amazon's, but available to other retailers and even to individuals.
I personally think that America is slowly becoming more like Brazil and South Africa. But we'll just have more elaborate rationalizations for all of these changes.
The solution here in Norway is that packages too big to fit in your post box (12x 25x35 cm) are delivered to a local supermarket, petrol station, or other shop nearby. You get a text or a note in the post with a number on it and go to collect it, if is valuable you will have to show ID.
I've lived on the west coast my whole life, so I don't know much about other types of cities. Suffice it to say, all the major cities on the west coast have a lot of empathy for the downtrodden, such as the homeless and drug-addicted and they don't want to treat people who have such problems as criminals. But you could argue that they've gone too far with empathy. You should look up this documentary "Seattle Is Dying" by a local Seattle news station (KOMO4). They've actually done 2 parts to it, several years apart. Really shows you what's going on the west coast and how excessive compassion can have unintended consequences.
Myself, lean left of center politically, but it's become very clear to me that liberal policies are just not working for the cities along the west coast (Seattle, Portland, SF, LA, etc). Now, this article talks about NYC, which is on the other side of the country. And we all know that Chicago, quite possibly the democrat-affiliated major city, has been infamous for its crime and corruption since the times of Al Capone. So it seems to me that there is a pattern of very left-leaning cities creating policies that come from a good place but end up having disastrous consequences.
What's the punishment? What are the odds of stopping them from doing it again? They'll just go back to stealing packages after spending a few days in jail. People who do these things frequently have no reason not to because the available punishments do not affect them.
I lived in a LARGE apartment building for many years. We had some package theft, so I let it be known that I would accept deliveries for other residents during the day. (I worked nights.) I did not charge for this service - but I did accept tips.
One wonders how long it will be before people simply start trying to open package lockers, e.g. with a battery powered angle grinder like bike thieves use. Sure, I suppose there are cameras on these lockers, but from news reports about package theft in the US, it seems like many of these thieves don’t care at all if their face is caught on camera.
Based on my personal experience, these aren't professional thieves casing buildings with an Ocean's 11 crew. They're opportunistic, and will just attempt to enter a building if they can. They're not going to invest in an angle-grinder - a loud, attention-grabbing device - to gamble getting a six-pack of toilet paper and a vacuum hose. Especially not when you can enter a building just by going into the lobby and buzzing every apartment by running your hand down the call box until someone finally buzzes you in.
Oh they resisted eh? Exactly how? I'm not seeing much of anything in this article, besides getting a security camera reactivated so that they can see a video of who stole their stuff, which will never be followed up on anyways.
I want to feel sorry for them, but I cannot forget that this is exactly what they asked for. In all probability, the actual people in this building they featured, that is. They got the state to abolish bail for people arrested for these "low-value property crimes". They elected DAs who promised to not prosecute them at all. They are probably even now campaigning to "abolish the police" entirely. In case anyone was wondering, they've also published articles declaring that yes they really do want to literally abolish the police and it is not at all a euphemism for some kind of reform. What they're seeing now is exactly what they asked for. Now they want to whine about their packages getting stolen? Too bad, wake me when the start advocating for actual enforcement against brazen theft.
The story certainly didn't mention any attempt by any of them to advocate or help campaign for increased enforcement, prosecution, and restoring bail requirements for such crimes.
When nearly all visible agitation is in favor of zero enforcement or consequences against the crimes they're complaining about being the victim of, it's kind of counterproductive to not push back.
