Thefts of delivery workers on rise

NEW YORK » Manuel PerezSaucedo was making his last food delivery of the day in Brooklyn one evening last fall when two men on a motorcycle trailed him for several blocks and then passed him.

But when he stopped his electric bicycle outside his destination on a dark street minutes later, the men emerged from the shadows. One had a pistol.

“I knew it was my turn to get robbed,” he said. He remembered picturing his 2-year-old son while the men took his bike, which cost him about $1,600. “I didn’t want to leave him without a father.”

Perez-Saucedo, 33, is one of a growing number of delivery workers who have been victims of robberies and other violent assaults as their numbers have swelled since the pandemic first swept through the nation’s largest city a year ago.

The delivery of restaurant orders and other goods has become a bigger part of daily life across the nation since the pandemic forced millions of people indoors. And in New York City where the disease has taken nearly 30,000 lives the delivery workers have become a lifeline for people working from home and for vulnerable residents who have been warned against going outside.

On any given day thousands of men, and a growing number of women, can be seen crisscrossing city arteries.

But their visibility has also made them targets for opportunistic criminals looking for a quick profit through robbery, as the unemployment rate has spiked into the double digits and economic desperation has grown in the city’s less affluent neighborhoods.