Two days ago, we had a mailman robbed about three blocks from my house.
A huge shock since this neighborhood is pretty safe. There’s a lot of older people that bought houses here forty or more years ago and never left. There’s families with young kids. I feel comfortable watching tv with the front door open and running my attic fan. This is hardly the “projects”. We have an active neighborhood association that’s had cops and people from the mayors office speak at our meetings. We’re doing what we can to keep this place safe for kids.
Sadly there are some rent houses with some real scum of the earth types. The robbery was quite brazen. 11 AM, beautiful sunny morning and a couple guys in hoodies show up with their gun.
Here’s what the postal service is saying in the news report. I’m not posting a link because my neighborhood is mentioned.
I’ve lived here over 20 years. Now they consider us a high crime area because of two a-holes? What are the 75 to 80 year old residents supposed to do? Some don’t even drive anymore because of their health.
How long can the post office deny mail to hundreds of residents? Is this crap permanent? One crime is committed and hundreds and hundreds of residents are disenfranchised? WTF?
Got a link where we could get some more info? By the sounds of it, it’s a temporary thing, based not so much on your area being “high crime” so much as it is “an area that very recently had one of our employees robbed at gunpoint”. It’s not totally unreasonable for them to want to back off from the area perhaps while a police investigation takes place.
Here’s the story. It’s a large neighborhood. Several hundred houses. It sounds like the criminals didn’t get over 20 bucks off this poor guy. Now they have a 50 grand reward for their arrest. Hopefully that will happen very soon.
However, I have to say I don’t think there’s any require that they deliver, because where I live, they don’t. We all have PO boxes. We have to pay for them. It sucks.
I don’t want to hijack, but what would make someone uncomfortable with running an attic fan in an unsafe neighborhood? (I understand the open door part, just not how running an attic fan is somehow comparable to leaving a door open.)
The mail suspension will probably be very brief, but you could call your Congressman’s district office Monday morning – the staff there can get more information and have the local post office decision to suspend service reviewed at a much higher level.
Running the attic fan requires having the door open and a few open windows in other rooms. You get the strongest breeze that way. It’s been hot the last few days.
Thank you for your answers on the mail suspension. Hopefully they’ll calm down and rethink the situation. If not, the neighborhood association will need to call somebody. Maybe the Mayor’s office or Congressman’s office.
It would make more sense to me to intentionally return to the area, but have the guy supervised by police. If someone is stupid enough to attack the guy again, you’ll be able to stop him and punish him. More likely it will just guarantee that the postal worker will not have problems.
Even without protection, it would be pretty stupid to attack someone again, as they will be ready for you. The policeman would only be for peace of mind–the same reason they are shutting down the mail.
This was an unusual situation. I’ve never heard of mail carriers getting robbed before. They don’t carry anything of real value. The federal charges are so severe it’s a pretty stupid crime. I hope they catch them quickly.
They aren’t denying mail. They are just suspending home delivery. The USPS is not legally required to make home deliveries, and in many areas they don’t.
My guess is that the suspension of delivery in your neighborhood won’t last very long. I’d suggest that a friendly call to the post office alerting the local postmaster to express these sincere concerns (and expressing support for the carrier who was robbed) would go a long way. Indignation isn;t going to accomplish anything other than high blood pressure.