Several South Davis neighborhoods are poised to receive new centralized mailboxes, weeks after residents of the Willowcreek and Woodbridge areas reported having theirs breached and raided of mail and packages.
“We’re going to be upgrading to the newer, high-security mailboxes that are a lot harder to defeat,” Jeff Fitch, spokesman for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s San Francisco division, told The Davis Enterprise on Friday, more than a month after residents first reported the repeated mail thefts.
Fitch declined to go into detail about the new mailboxes’ security features to avoid educating potential thieves, saying only they have “a number of different levels” of defense that will help keep future break-ins at bay. Other Davis neighborhoods may see theirs replaced as well.
“We appreciate the frustrations” of the affected residents, Fitch added, noting that the Davis community isn’t alone. “We’ve seen an increase statewide in mail theft over the past couple of years.”
The South Davis mail thefts date back to late April, when residents of Mono Place said they learned from their local postal carrier that someone may have obtained a master key to the area’s cluster mailboxes — the multi-box units typically located in newer neighborhoods — and used it to steal the mail.
That led to a neighborhood conversation on the Nextdoor social media platform and complaints to the Postal Inspection Service — the law-enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service — which pledged to conduct an investigation into the thefts, which are federal crimes.
But the pilfering continued with outright break-ins, leaving the Mono Place mailbox so damaged that residents were unable to have their mail delivered, according to emails sent to The Enterprise. Their frustrations mounted, they said, when they received scant information from postal officials as to when or how the problem would be solved.
“Neighbors are missing packages, letters, tax documents, credit cards and possibly stimulus checks or debit cards,” resident Paula Koltnow wrote in an email sent to members of the Davis City Council, as well as well as Yolo County Supervisor Jim Provenza and Rep. John Garamendi.
“Right now we aren’t getting any mail at all. Also no explanations or inquiries into how this situation affects us all,” Koltnow wrote.
As Koltnow and her neighbors appealed to their elected officials for help, thieves last week targeted additional cluster mailboxes on Boxelder Place, La Paz Drive and Wintun Place, according to the Davis Police Department’s online bulletin.
Fitch said the Postal Inspection Service’s Sacramento-area mail theft team is “actively working these break-ins as we speak.” The public can help, he added, by filing reports to document resulting incidents of identity and credit-card theft.
“It’s critical for them to make a report with us if they see any transactions they did not make,” Fitch said. “That helps us develop evidence to identify who these individuals are so we can make an arrest.”
Reports can be filed online at www.uspis.gov/report/. Meanwhile, anyone with information that could aid the ongoing investigation is urged to call the Postal Inspection Service’s 24-hour dispatch line at 877-876-2455.
Theft victims also should notify their local law-enforcement agencies, as “we work very closely with those partners and share information” that could aid an investigation, Fitch added.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene