The cover of a United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General report on arrow keys
A Central District armed robbery of a United States Postal Service worker last week is part of a trend of hold-ups targeting mail carriers for their keys which can give access to package and mail-stuffed collection boxes.
According to Seattle Police, a carrier called 911 last Thursday morning reporting she had been robbed at gunpoint along MLK Way south of Dearborn. The victim told police the suspect approached her as she was getting mail and packages out of the truck, pointed a black handgun, and demanded her keys and phone.
According to the report on the 11 AM incident, the carrier handed over her phone and keys and the suspect fled the scene. She was able to track the phone but when police checked the location, the suspect was long gone.
There were no reported injuries.
According to this recent industry report, USPS says there has been a “dramatic escalation” in robberies against letter carriers. The real target? The postal service’s “arrow keys” used to access USPS collection boxes to steal mail and packages.
CHS reached out to the local United States Postal Service’s media representative for Washington to ask about the hold-up and what is being done to secure area collection boxes but they declined to comment and referred questions to the office of the US Postal Inspection Service which has not responded.
We also asked for any statistics available on safety incidents for postal carriers in Seattle but got numbers back on another threat. “In calendar year 2021, more than 5,400 postal employees were attacked by dogs in the United States,” the rep said. “Seattle ranked 18th highest with 24 dog attacks. Updated statistics for calendar year 2022 will be out later this year.”
HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.
Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.
Something as innocent and necessary as being a postal worker shouldn’t be provoking a robbery, it’s disconcerting. People aren’t raised right.
Or capitalism breeds this behavior. Gangs and black market crime will always exist in this system. It’s part of the design.
Not sure that follows. Have you considered the amount of gangs and black market crime in communist/extreme socialist countries?
Of course not, that doesn’t reinforce the narrative.
Bingo. lol
Capitalism is inherently violent. It relies on the extraction of resources and labor. This is why we are seeing an intentional effort by the Fed to contract the economy and increase unemployment. This will tamp down wage growth that is still significantly lagging behind CEO and corporate profits.
Also, there are very few countries that are large enough and powerful enough to exist largely outside of the global capitalist markets, and criminals and gangs have access to these markets, so I think it’s incredibly difficult to point to “communist” or “extreme socialist” countries as an effective counterargument.
Your comment is so simplistic. What about the many factors that lead to criminal behavior, such as bad parenting?
I think one could easily make the argument that capitalism has been detrimental to parenting… Especially the hyper-individualstic style we practice in the US
Ugh, poor postal carriers can’t catch a break! They’re under attack from the inside and now an uptick in robberies and dog attacks on the outside. We LOVE our longtime mail carrier and I hate to think of her facing this kind of violence. And for what? To steal junk ordered from Amazon and cheap fast fashion? Just awful.
“Junk ordered from Amazon and fast fashion” might be what you get delivered, but for a lot of people much more valuable things get delivered via the USPS.
A thankless job made even more thankless by it’s current administration made yet more thankless by a callous public. Why would anyone want to do this all-important service anymore?
Privatize? Have you tried lately to deal with a carrier’s home delivery when things don’t conform to their ideal conditions?
What does “the public” have to do with anything? This was a criminal act by a d-bag criminal.
Yeah no seriously. Some of these reactions are so weirdly illogical that you’d think it’s derision bots from Russia or something.
Well i am definitely not going to mail anything anymore though the post office I will always be paying my bill’s online and doing my Christmas cards online from now on
For security, simply deposit your letters inside the post office, not in a box on the street.
Going online isn’t necessarily safer. If you pay a bill by post, the thief has to be in the same physical location as the mailed check. If you pay online, the hacker that’s targeting the bank’s website can be anywhere in the world. Just think, someone is trying to hack our online accounts even as you read this…
There is no such thing as 100% secure but banks on line bill pay services use 256 bit encryption which is almost impossible to crack far safer than the mail!!
Because criminals want your Christmas cards. LMAO!
The arrow key can open the front door to condos/ apartments as well as the boxes.
You might want to delete that comment.
Yes, All of these comments are people thinking that the criminal wants the Arrow key to get into the blue boxes. Hardly anyone uses those blue boxes, but the criminals know that these Arrow keys will access almost all of the apartment/condo buildings in the city.
The Postal Service uses a universal key, known as an arrow key, to access collection boxes, outdoor parcel lockers, cluster box units, and apartment panels