Cie Bond had picked out the perfect Christmas gift for her mother-in-law - a book, ordered in the mail.
Days before the 2002 holiday, the present arrived ready to be wrapped at Bond's Evanston home. There was only one problem: the package was stolen from her porch.
Bond, 43, had four packages stolen that holiday season. That year, she put up a fence and a sign telling deliverers never to leave packages in plain sight again.
Though Bond hasn't had anything stolen since then, many Evanston residents have had their mail taken recently. The rash of thefts led the Postal Service to start more consistently enforcing its policy of not leaving mail when nobody is home, said Evanston Postmaster Andre Yarbrough.
"There's been a lot of complaints, more than you can imagine," he said. "There's people who trail mailmen and UPS drivers at times for the sole purpose of seeing what's left behind ... So what we're doing here in Evanston is being careful."
Instead, residents who are not home when the mail carrier comes will have to go to the post office to pick up their packages, Yarbrough said.
The shift isn't an official change in a policy that has required United States Postal Service workers for 30 years not to leave packages unattended unless customers give prior permission, but it is a warning to carriers to follow the guidelines, Yarbrough said. The postal workers have some discretion on leaving packages, depending on the neighborhood and whether the delivery is to an apartment or house.
Representatives from UPS and FedEx also said the individual drivers decide whether to leave packages.
An employee from the Chicago bureau of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service said he wasn't aware of the change in Evanston.
"We've had outstanding relationships with both the Evanston Police Department and Northwestern University Police," Postal Inspector David Colen said. "We come together to combat any local issues."
Evanston police did not immediately return phone messages asking if they had seen an increase in mail theft citations. No national numbers were available concerning how many of the approximately 213 billion delivered pieces of mail each year are reported taken.
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