Originally published at: California woman mailed Apple AirTag to herself to catch her porch pirates - Boing Boing
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Clever.
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I hate it when people steal from other people.
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I am extremely shocked that the police followed up on this. One does get the feeling that a crime that doesn’t happen in front of their eyes doesn’t exist.
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My impression of late is that if a citizen does all the detective work and essentially sets the coppers up for a successful bust, they will follow up on it.
If you call to report thefts, even multiple thefts, however, forget about getting any help.
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Yeah, that’s the aspect that seems to make this story unique. There are a ton of stories out there where people have tracked the locations of stolen packages, phones, etc. to the residences of suspected thieves but were unable to get law enforcement to take action. But maybe that depends on the municipality, and where property crimes fall on their priority list?
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Go ahead, take the package…
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Honestly surprised the cops even responded here. I was hearing about how, locally, someone tracked their stolen car and called the cops, and the response was disinterest. I guess the federal crime in this case, plus the expectation that the mail thieves would have other stolen mail (so lots of charges) was too juicy to ignore…
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Mail thieves suck.
In NYC there seem to be a bunch of criminals who have keys to the USPS relay boxes* and go around the city pilfering large amounts of mail all at once. My entire (800 unit) apartment building’s mail has been stolen at least twice in the last couple years. But it’s extremely hard to catch them because they strike in different spots at random. The thieves in this story must have been particularly dumb to hit the same spot often enough that they managed to intercept this lady’s AirTag. I’d have to mail an AirTag to myself every day for a year to have a decent shot of catching our mail thieves.
*In urban areas where postal workers deliver the mail on foot, the USPS often uses curbside “relay boxes” that look similar to the standard blue USPS mailboxes but are painted green and have no slot. They stash the mail inside until they’re ready to deliver it to a particular block or a particular big building.
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I have seen Reddit posts for the Austin area where the cops here have been called for similar thefts and nothing happens.
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Yep, and it’s all over the US, not just NYC. It’s very easy to manufacture these lock box keys.
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Wouldn’t it be great if the police offered to do this? Even had airtags to send out?
You’d think the Postal Police would start doing it.
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Yeah, the cops usually don’t seem all that interested in mail theft either, I wonder what made this case different.
It is possible that the woman was making noise online and the attention forced the cops to do something about it
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So I mentioned in another thread that I had federal grand jury duty for six months. While it was before the wide availability of air tags, I can say that US Postal OIG special agents follow up with these kind of issues (many of the indictment request were from the USPS agents). If I were to extrapolate what I remember from over 10 years ago, I would guess that the agents probably utilize air tags in current investigations.
However, agents only pursue mail theft if they’ve been alerted to it. Most people go to their local police and mail theft is a federal crime. I seem to recall that local police in Los Angeles reached out to their federal counterparts for one specific case, but I have no idea if this is typical.
People always forget to reach out to their congressperson for help. This is what they are meant to do and they can assist constituents get help from the postal inspectors if they reported it online to the federal inspector and haven’t received any feedback. Having reached out to my local congressperson a number of times, they are quick to respond and it’s amazing how quick various agencies follow up. (I can only assume that US Reps can be a major thorn in an agency’s ass.)
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But that’s where the stuff is.
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