A Thief or Bad Postal Service? Packages Are Missing In Ditmas Park.
DITMAS PARK – Amazon may soon be our next door neighbor, but Amazon packages have been missing across Ditmas Park and Kensington for months.
In over six months, over 100 packages (both Amazon and others) have been reported missing by neighbors at a building near Cortelyou and Stratford alone — and that is just one building in the 11218 zip code, served by the Kensington Post Office on McDonald Avenue. It came to the point where resident Eddie Shiomi organized a meeting in the building to discuss solutions and to hear complaints.
“Personally, I have not missed a package,” the ten-year resident said. But the many other residents in his building have. So, he decided to create a spreadsheet to track the missing packages.
“It started with a few people. In the month of August, it exploded,” Shiomi said. “People started writing notes on our list. People left notes in the mail area. I thought someone has got to do something.”
Here is a portion of Shiomi’s theft tracking chart. He explained that there is no data for late September and October because the capture sheet for reporting thefts filled up completely and hasn’t been replaced.
According to Shiomi, when residents would track their package online, it would say that it had been delivered. But it wasn’t.
In the first building meeting, a woman from another building in the neighborhood joined in. That is when Shiomi realized they had a real problem on their hands.
It seems to be a problem that has been occurring for quite some time now. Shiomi’s post on the Ditmas Park Facebook group brought one neighbor who said, “I’m a former tenant [at that building] who had similar problems when I was there.”
One neighbor in Kensington said the same issue has been happening in her building for over a year.
“We do not have a camera and about 40% of the time the lock on the front door is broken. They leave them in the lobby inside the front door. Our packages have either been stolen or regularly opened and looked through. Our management company does not care, and we’ll be moving out soon after six years of living here.”
And it extends to private homes as well.
“It happens regularly on my block (I’m in a private residence, not a building, but Amazon et al regularly just leave packages on the front stoop in the middle of the day so they’re sitting ducks),” another neighbor wrote.
Sara Khan is a resident in Ditmas Park and has been living in her building for one year, having moved from Maryland. Just two months ago, she was waiting for a package. She checked online and it said it delivered, but she received no such package.
“UPS or USPS or whoever they are, always leave the packages downstairs near the mailboxes,” she said. “And that is unfair because they get stolen. We don’t have cameras, so I do not know who took my package.”
Shiomi echoes the sentiment.
“We knew a person in the past that was stealing packages, but we aren’t so sure what’s happening now,” Shiomi said. “And it’s not just a one-building thing. Some are rental buildings, some are co-ops.”
So what is happening?
Some residents decided to plant dummy packages and leave them in the lobby of the building. The next day, the packages were gone. Shiomi believes that there may be several ways to explain the missing packages.
“We have a resident who believes the crimes are happening at the post office level due to the little gold mines called Amazon packages and the evergrowing cultural phenomena of direct mail,” he said. “Most believe the culprits are from both outside and inside the building.”
Someone in the building put a letter on the door saying if the resident isn’t home, do not leave the package in the lobby. But, packages are still left in the lobby.
“If you are a letter carrier with a package and cannot leave it at the location safely — meaning not into a box or in line of sight — we’re instructed to bring it back for the security of the package,” Darleen Reid-DeMeo, Senior Public Relations Representative for the US Postal Service told us back in 2016.
As of now, Shiomi and other residents have not reached out to local officials concerning the packages. He says it is the reason why they formed a collective; to see if they can solve the problem. If they don’t get to the bottom of it, they may involve others.
Shawn Campbell, the district manager of Community Board 14 said they have received no such complaints from anyone and if they do, they will refer them to the 70th Precinct.
We reached out to the NYPD and were told that there have been no complaints of stolen packages since January of this year at Shiomi’s Stratford Rd. address.
“These individuals are not filing police reports,” the officer said.
Why is that so?
“If they are like me, I have little faith that calling the police will result in anything useful,” Shiomi said. “Also, I’ll now be on record with the management company and they may take retribution with me somehow for bringing it up.”
Shiomi also said that though he believes it’s someone from the neighborhood, the missing packages could also be the fault of the post office level.
A News12 report from 2016 documented the poor service of the Flatbush Post Office. The video prompted neighbors to share their stories of other post offices.
“It’s a mess up here, seriously,” said neighbor Amy Win of the Empire Post Office, 11225. “I avoid ordering online as much as possible because of the mail situation. I rarely see pink slips; I check tracking online daily if I’m expecting something. I think it’s the inconsistency which is most maddening. Some of the carriers are great, but I can’t count on the service overall.”
In April, a Dyker Heights postal worker was arrested for hoarding 17,000 pieces of undelivered mail in his car, locker, and apartment since 2015. In 2017, a mailman in Bath Beach and Flatbush was busted for trashing nearly 3,000 letters.
Back in February, Congresswoman Yvette Clarke met with the Brooklyn Postmaster, Anthony Impronto to discuss late delivery, lost packages, customer service, staff shortage, suspension of mail, issues with mail service to affordable housing buildings, and issues affecting seniors and people with disabilities.
What came out of the meeting? Possible solutions, including updating equipment and technology, better training for staff, and staff retention were discussed, we are told, though Clarke’s office would not share any specifics.
Sure, it may be a post office issue, but as Shiomi said, it could also be a neighborhood thief. So, the concerned residents conducted a letter-writing campaign to the building’s manager to install cameras in the lobby. They began looking into the cost of surveillance cameras in the building, which they acknowledged would be expensive.
But, they got it done.
“After some pressure, the building management installed a camera for the mail area,” Shiomi said. “Most people have opted to have packages mailed to their place or work, friend’s home or other more secure location.”
“There’s just no accountability within the whole delivery pipeline,” he said. “We just want packages delivered to our apartments.”
With the holidays just around the corner and Cyber Monday coming up in a week, Amazon (and others) will be busy, and what’s to say packages will be delivered outside our doors? Neighbors recommend being cautious and routinely checking for updates of the location of the package.
“As soon as you see that it has been delivered, and it is not in your hands, run downstairs and pick it up, because that is most likely where they left it,” Khan advised. “That’s what I’ve been doing for the past two months.”
We reached out to USPS and the 70 Precinct numerous times but did not hear back.