Porch Pirates Find Opportunity As Holiday Package Deliveries Ramp Up

ACROSS AMERICA — ’Tis the season to open the door and find the package you thought had been delivered has been stolen almost literally right from under your nose.

Growing e-commerce sales are increasing porch thefts nationwide. About 90 percent of respondents to a survey of 2,600 Americans by the Chicago-based C+R Research firm said they receive a package at least once a month, and 55 percent said they receive packages weekly.

That survey was conducted in September, before the crush of holiday deliveries. At the time, 1 in 7 Americans reported they had had a package stolen this year.

Another survey, by the home safety website SafeWise.com and home security provider Vivant, found that more than 260 million packages were stolen from November 2021 to November 2022, costing Americans about $19.5 billion — about $59 per person.

In the fifth annual SafeWise/Vivant survey of 1,000 people, about 79 percent reported a stolen package, compared to 64 percent during the previous 12-month period. The report also uses FBI larceny theft data from U.S. metro areas and Google Trends searches for “missing package” and “stolen packages.”

The SafeWise/Vivant survey, though limited, is one of the few quantitative measures of the extent of porch piracy, a relatively new phenomenon — but one that prompted a Minnesota congressman to introduce legislation that would make package thefts a federal crime, on par with theft from the U.S. mail.

U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips, a Democrat from the Twin Cities area, introduced the Porch Pirates Act of 2022 earlier this year. His bill was referred to the House Judiciary Committee for consideration in February but has not been taken up by the entire chamber.

Current penalties for the theft of packages from carriers such as FedEx, UPS and Amazon are minimal, Phillips said earlier this year.

“While some states have enacted stronger penalties for the theft of non-USPS mail and packages, most have not — leaving the majority of Americans unprotected,” Phillips said in a statement.

Vulnerable And Scared

Porch piracy leaves U.S. consumers feeling vulnerable and scared, according to a study by researchers at Middle Tennessee State University’s Department of Criminal Justice Administration. Nearly a quarter of Americans in a survey of about 560 people across 49 states said they’d had their packages stolen, according to research, published online in the American Journal of Criminology in 2020.

One problem, according to the study authors, is that consumers whose packages are stolen are treated as victims, while other losses suffered along the supply chain — for example, warehouse thefts — would be considered a loss to the retailer or delivery company.

These crimes receive little attention by police agencies, which generally don’t track porch piracy separately from other thefts, which means there’s little empirical data about the frequency of package thefts, according to the researchers.

“The lack of research and knowledge on this crime has left police agencies, shipping companies, retailers, and residents struggling to grasp the true extent of the problem and to identify and implement techniques to prevent this crime,” the authors wrote in an abstract.

“As a result, victims (and some police agencies) have been taking to social media to express concern, outrage, and share surveillance videos of this crime, culminating in a growing tide of public awareness and frustration at the inability to prevent this crime.”

That fosters fear, something that hasn’t been addressed until now, the researchers said.

“Unfortunately, increasing awareness about a crime without a clear way to prevent it may foster fear, rather than dissuade it,” the authors wrote, citing earlier empirical studies. “As the awareness and frustration mounts, many people are experiencing a fear of package theft. However, no studies have addressed the impact that fear of package theft has on the public.”

‘Critical’ Retailers Understand Fear

The pandemic rewrote the rules of retail shopping. E-commerce sales increased about 35 percent from 2020 to 2021, with online penetration about 30 percent higher than before the pandemic, according to research from McKinsey & Company, a Chicago-based management consulting firm.

The number of packages left unattended at doorsteps by delivery services is expected to continue to rise over the next decade. The researchers said understanding people’s qualms about making online orders will be “critical” for retailers, police and others.

For example, a 2019 survey of 1,238 U.S. adults by New York City-based Canary electronics company found that 32 percent of Americans would buy less online if they knew porch pirates were operating in their neighborhood.

The 2022 C+R Research survey found that about 45 percent of Americans don’t think retailers are doing enough to prevent package thefts, and a greater share (48 percent) said delivery companies need to do more.

Where Do Package Thefts Happen?

Nearly half (49 percent) of package theft victims live in suburbs, and 39 percent live in cities, according to the C+R Research survey. People who live in rural areas are the least likely (12 percent) to have their packages stolen.

The 2022 SafeWise/Vivant survey found that 3 in 4 Americans have been a victim of package theft in their lifetime; 79 percent have had their packages stolen in the last 12 months, an increase of 15 percentage points from 2021; more than half of porch pirate victims have had multiple packages stolen in the last 12 months; and 40 percent of all packages stolen are valued between $50 and $100.

That survey found the metro areas where package thefts most often occur are:

1. San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, California (No. 2 last year)
2. Seattle-Tacoma, Washington (No. 4 last year)
3. Austin, Texas (No. 6 last year)
4. Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut (No. 10 last year)
5. Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto, California (No. 14 last year)
6. Los Angeles, California (No. 15 last year)
7. Portland, Oregon (No. 7 last year)
8. Fresno-Visalia, California (No. 18 last year)
9. Milwaukee, Wisconsin (No. 26 last year)
10. New Orleans, Louisiana (No. 24 last year)

The cities where porch piracy is less of a problem than in the rest of the country are:

1. Miami-Fort Lauderdale, Florida (No. 15 last year)
2. Tampa-St. Petersburg (Sarasota), Florida (No. 4 last year)
3. Raleigh-Durham (Fayetteville), North Carolina (No. 22, ninth worst, last year)
4. Orlando-Daytona Beach-Melbourne, Florida (No. 6 last year)
5. Cleveland-Akron (Canton), Ohio (No. 1 last year)
6. Detroit, Michigan (No. 3 last year)
7. Cincinnati, Ohio (No. 2 last year)
8. Nashville, Tennessee (No. 19 last year)
9. San Diego, California (No. 26, fifth worst, last year)
10. San Antonio, Texas (No. 15 last year)

To minimize the risk of package thefts, home security experts recommend that consumers install a doorbell camera or other type of surveillance camera that records activity at their front doors and allows them to monitor what’s going on remotely.

Experts also advised tracking orders online, signing up for delivery alerts or buying online, but picking up orders from the store.

People who work away from home may want to arrange to be home when deliveries are made, or have their packages dropped off at the office or some other address where someone is around to claim them.