How to prevent porch pirates from running off with your Amazon Prime day booty

How to prevent porch pirates from running off with your Amazon Prime Day booty

Ordering a new TV, iPad or Dyson vacuum on the final day of Amazon’s Prime Day sales event? If you’re not careful, it may end up in the hands of a thief before it ever gets to you. D.C.’s police department is offering tips on how to keep your packages safe.

“When you get an increased amount of packages, you’re going to probably get an increased amount of package theft,” D.C. police Cmdr. Sylvan Altieri.

Whether you have one box or a dozen heading your way, Altieri suggests having your packages shipped to Amazon lockers that have been installed at the nearest police station.

“We’re the first major city to partner with Amazon in something like this,” Altieri said. “We have the lockers at every police station, seven police districts.”

Unlike similar lockers at grocery and convenience stores, these Amazon lockers are well guarded and open 24 hours a day. He said they are seeing about 1,000 packages go through each set of lockers per month.

As opposed to an organized group of thieves, Altieri said in D.C. porch piracy is a crime of convenience where people who happen to see a package end up stealing it.

Since many of the thieves law enforcement has caught are repeat offenders, D.C. police have begun conducting sting operations to catch porch pirates in the act.

With the homeowner’s permission, they will leave fake packages on porches with an AirTag or other tracking device inside.

“We wait for someone to come take it, we track it, we make an arrest,” Altieri said. “We put $1 bill in it, simply because it’s better when you go to court to have something to say, ‘this item belongs to us’ and with a $1 bill, you have the serial number and you can record that.”

While the offense seems minor, Altieri who oversees the fifth district, said there’s not a community meeting where he doesn’t hear somebody talk about package theft.

“People now are starting to focus more on these quality-of-life issues,” he said.

Another way he said the community can help fight package theft and other property crimes is to sign up for the Camera Connect program. It allows police to see through private security cameras faster to get a better look at thieves sooner.

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