Police on lookout for season’s thievings
As more consumers shop online, package theft grows
SAN FRANCISCO – John Priskorn’s porch pirate story is unlike almost all others because of how it ended – his package was recovered, the culprit arrested.
He’s the rare exception to a growing problem. More Americans are doing their shopping online, which made up to 9 percent of all retail sales in the United States as of September, according to the Department of Commerce. But those packages are just too enticing to thieves.
“I know this is America and you should have a God-given right to have packages delivered to your front door. But we have these people throwing packages on your property at all hours of the day,” said Capt. Jack Hart with the San Francisco Police Department.
Thirty percent of Americans say they’ve experienced package theft, according to a survey by Xfinity Home, Comcast’s home security service. The Denver Police Department, which tracks package theft, has seen incidents rise every year since 2015.
It’s just common sense that along with all the tremendous upsides to ordering online, the downside is things can be stolen, said Cathy Roberson, a shipping and delivery expert with Logistics Trends & Insights in Atlanta.
“You’ve got something worth 200 bucks being delivered to your home? You better be sitting on your front porch when it arrives,” she said.
Priskorn tried to be. The package was scheduled for delivery on Saturday when he was at home but it never arrived. On Monday he had to go to work, Priskorn, a product director with a health care company, said.
What happened next played out like a movie. At 10:28 am on Oct. 22, the package was delivered to his home in San Francisco. Four hours later, a woman walked up to his doorway, grabbed the package and walked away.
His doorbell camera captured the theft and sent him an alert. As soon as he saw the video, he downloaded it and posted it on NextDoor, a social network for neighborhoods.
Within an hour he got a response from Hart, chief of his local precinct. A few hours later, he got a note from a neighbor who’d had a package stolen about the same time. She found another neighbor whose security camera had gotten footage of the woman driving off in her car – and its license plate.
That broke the case. Within 24 hours officers searched her apartment and found not just Priskorn’s package but multiple others. She was arrested and later convicted of second-degree burglary.
Solutions
A frequently touted solution is electronic locks and locked boxes consumers can leave out for delivery. But that assumes the delivery person will take the time to use them, which judging from reviews they frequently don’t.
In fact, notes seldom seem to do much good. Yan Gelman lives in a four-unit condo building and he and his neighbors have a prominent sign asking delivery people to ring all the doorbells to find someone to leave packages with.
None of it did any good recently when he received a text at 3:10 p.m. from Amazon telling him his package had been delivered. “I clicked on the link and it said that at 3:06 it had been directly handed to me,” he recalled.
It hadn’t.
He ran outside but it was too late. All he found was the box, which the thief had neatly sliced open.
“I’d bought a $120 Amazon Cube and two bottles of vitamins. They left the vitamins,” he said ruefully.
A call to Amazon resulted in an immediate refund and the items were sent again. That’s an important point to note – almost every e-commerce company will quickly resend a reasonable number of orders, no questions asked. But the time lag and hassle are the real cost of having items stolen.
A hard crime to combat
Police departments nationwide are dealing with increasing frustration over package theft, though there’s not a great deal they can do.
Denver has about a 7 percent arrest rate for porch pirates, said Doug Schepman, spokesman for the Denver Police Department. He encourages victims to call and report the thefts.
Some police departments put out bait packages, to catch thieves and get the word out on the street that this particular crime has consequences. In Elk Grove, California are testing a bait package program. The packages contain a transponder, alerting officers when they’re moved so they can follow the thieves.
What to do
You’d think being at home when the package arrives would take care of the problem, but you can’t necessarily depend on a knock on the door.
You always can opt to have things delivered to your workplace, but you still have to carry the package home. And some businesses now say no to personal deliveries.
There are other options. Because as much as 50 percent of all U.S. online purchases go through Amazon, let’s start there.
Amazon has three relatively foolproof ways to make sure your package isn’t stolen, but one’s slightly creepy, the other’s not always possible and the third is annoying.
The first is Amazon Key. It requires installing an electronic lock on your door. Amazon sends its delivery person a message that allows them to briefly open that lock so they can place packages inside.
The in-home delivery option comes with multiple security and privacy safeguards but doesn’t appear to have been as popular as Amazon had hoped.
The second option is in-car delivery. This allows the delivery person to electronically unlock your car and leave packages in the trunk but is available only on limited car models, and requires that your car be parked where the delivery person can get to it.
The third option is to have your packages delivered to an Amazon locker. When the item is delivered, you’re sent an email with a six-digit code that unlocks the locker and you have three days to pick it up. Amazon has more than 2,800 lockers in more than 70 metropolitan areas. However some fill up and all require a trip.
Both UPS and FedEx offer similar services allowing packages to be held at a secure location for pickup.
The U.S. Postal Service has long left notes telling customers to come pick up their packages at the nearest post office. The downside of this is that post offices are pretty much 9-to-5 operations and can have long lines.
Back to the old ways
Of course, the ultimate solution to package theft is not to get packages at all. Priskorn says unless something fits in his mail slot he’s now more inclined to go to a store and buy it in person.
And his saga isn’t quite over yet. His wife never did get back her purchase, a sweater and some socks.
“The police are keeping it as evidence,” he says.