When I see pictures of all those little boxes, sitting on top of a post beside the road, I can easily see why messing with them would be seen as a serious crime. I guess we are spoiled over here, where the postie has to walk up the drive and push the mail through the slot in the door. They have to push it right through too - they can get in trouble for leaving it halfway.
Interfering with the mail is fairly serious here too:
The post office wants us to think even those of us with curbside boxes are spoiled, though. They’re no longer allowed in new developments, where residents are required to have their mail delivered to a remote “cluster box” serving several dozen homes.
At the risk of going slightly off-topic, I do have a question for the US Dopers:
Why is the USPS so HEAVY with this stuff?
I ask this as an employee of Australia Post. My employer does engage a security team. They do surveillance of employees and are on the lookout for postal fraud at the hands of our customers. However, they are essentially not much different to security in, say, a supermarket. They gather evidence, then refer matters to the police for prosecution.
The idea of our postal administration having its own federal scary cop / agent types is rather foreign to me. I’m not saying it isn’t kinda cool in a strange way, but I am curious as to how you guys think it may have evolved this way in the States but - as far as I can tell - nowhere else to the same extent.
Maybe it’s time the post was opened up to a bit of free enterprise. Or is that a step too far in the Land of the Free:)
Ahhh, youth. One school night when I was 15, 4 upper classmen (OMG! Seniors!) stopped by and asked if I wanted to go whack mailboxes. Me? Hells, yeah!
And we did. Every one got a turn in the front passenger seat with a baseball bat except me. Time ran out and I had to be home. I never did a thing.
Those knuckleheads though, went to the store, bought eggs, and went back to the same neighborhood we just left. Where the cops were waiting on them.:eek:
They went to jail, and one of more of them ratted me out, and the next day a Postal Inspector came to the house. Not a good meeting. The worst part was when my mom had me call my grandfather and tell him about it. The retired Postal Inspector.
Before court, we all went back and repaired or replaced all the boxes - about 4 bucks apiece back then. We got a few hours of community service, not a nickel in Joliet.
I’m glad for that, 'cause I can’t go to prison, man.
Years later, I laid it all out on my LEO app, and explained it, and it was no big deal.
I was in a detail assigned to guard Jesse Jackson back when he was a presidential candidate visiting Atlanta, and the Secret Service goes over everyone with a microscope, and they didn’t seem to care; I can’t imagine the bar is so concerned with youthful [del]felonies[/del] indiscretions, but I suppose I can understand…
I have laid open my past as a cautionary tale for my kids so they don’t do the stupid shit I did. My son’s goal is to work for the FBI, and so far he’s good!
Probably because the USA has a much higher amount of RFD (Rural Free Delivery) way out in lonely rural areas, and if such mailboxes were frequently stolen or damaged, it could seriously interfer with their delivery system. So they make the penalties quite heavy, and enforce them quite stringently, to discourage such damage to mailboxes. (While Australia Post has some isolated rural deliveries, it’s a much smaller proportion than the USA – must of your population is highly concentrated in a few cities & along the coastline.)
Growing up in rural Minnesota, there were people around who had built ‘strike-back’ mailboxes to combat mailbox baseball. These are typically very heavy steel boxes, mounted on sturdy metal poles, that are cemented in the ground, and spring-mounted or counter-weighted, so that when struck by a baseball bat from the front passenger seat, they recoil in time to smash the back passenger window, window pillar, back windshield, and/or back fender. There were a couple of welding shops that were experienced in designing & building custom versions of these. One of them liked to have the box number in metal rerod below the box, so that when it recoiled it left the box number punched into the back fender of the vehicle. Try coming up with an innocent explanation for that to your parents or a deputy sheriff.
P.S. Such flexible, spring mounted mailbox posts are also handy when the snowplow goes by after a big storm.
Historically, the USPS has taken a very serious attitude toward anyone who interferes with the mail because it meant disruption of business. Contracts were sent by mail, bills were sent by mail, payments were sent by mail. A vandal could end up causing your electricity to be shut off because you didn’t receive your bill or the utility company didn’t receive your payment. A lawsuit could be lost because a person didn’t respond to a summons in a timely manner. In recent years, people have come to rely on the USPS less and less for such things, instead sending email attachments and ACH payments or just ordinary fax machines, but I doubt the USPS has stopped taking it seriously.
Our policing system has evolved to be much more fragmented than Australia’s. Just like local areas are often responsible for operating their own police departments, it’s not uncommon for a government agency to have its own law enforcement division to handle its own particular issues.
Our federal system is a lot older than yours, and predates the telegraph and telephone. So, the importance of the US postal system was significantly greater when the US Constitution was written. Plus, our states had to accede to the national government, rather than being carved out of it. So, the relationship between the federal government and the state governments has been much more hostile at times than at any point in Australian history (that I’m aware of.)
Summons have always been served by sheriffs or process servers. Pretty much the only time you might receive a summons by mail (other than a jury summons) is if nobody knows where you are and it’s sent to your last known address as a supplement to publication.
Wow, what haven’t you done is more like it! :eek: