90k packages are stolen in NYC every day – How one building fought back
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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?
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 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."
Edit: Fixed subject/verb number disagreement.
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 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?
BTW: Would the Singapore system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore ), properly enforced, act as a credible deterrence?
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.
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.
Your mentality legitimizes crime.
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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.
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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.
Corporal means pertaining to the physical body.
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.
You comme back home after 2 weeks away and find your house occupied - can you use force to remove them from your property?
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/jilted-john-acquitted...
Crazy how big of a difference in laws there are across the states.
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
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.
For example, household burglary dropped 56% from 1994 to 2011. https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4657
Theft and motor vehicle theft have had similar major drops (figures 10 and 11): https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mpcncvs.pdf
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a basic competence issue.
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).
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.
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.
Just because that was the most vocal faction doesn't mean they are the only faction, or even the majority.
OTOH, if the alternative is instant corporal punishment (without clogging up the lines at the jail), then perhaps the laws can actually be enforced?
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.
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.
Just enough to deter casual/opportunistic theft.
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 :/
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 though that only happens in the movies xD
Or when buying stolen goods ("I swear man, it fall out of the back and into the middle of the road").
Because it ends with the package thefts still ongoing, and the author of the article resigned to their continuing.
But also really negligent landlords. It really shouldn't be possible to access resident's belongings with a plastic card.
And no, people are not this naive. Don't belittle them. That's just victim blaming.
It worked out very well.
I'm guessing Amazon lockers are fairly rare in NYC.
I'm also guessing that it's rare that you can get a post office box/UPS store box in NYC, what with real estate being so expensive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=paywalls%20by:dang&dateRange=a...
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.
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.