If you want to know where someone is most likely to steal your package, the short answer if you want to stop reading is Washington, DC. The nation’s capitol. Infer from that what you will. The cost may be up to $12 billion each year.

I only had one thing stolen this Christmas season, and it wasn’t from my porch. It was instead a mailbox, because the 600,000 employees of the US Postal Service don’t want to deliver mail here in California, they make us go to a central repository. And because they have unfunded liabilities of $125,000,000,000 they don’t want to hire more federal union employees with pensions, so they may hire contractors and a copy of a master key may just end up in the hands of a criminal who just opens up one remote cabinet with 20 mailboxes each, scoops it all into a bag, sorts the credit cards and small gifts later, and throws everything else away.

Image: Storyblocks

What do DC and California high crime share in common? It’s not poor people, it is a belief that crime is a social justice issue rather than a crime issue. Nearly 70% of people who steal stuff off the porch are not poor, while 51% are women. They’re simply criminals who want free stuff to keep or sell, it is not the fault of capitalism and only more government can fix it. In states like New York, California, Illinois, and districts like Washington, DC, government created the issue. Philadelphia also had high losses, but they are more like New Jersey than they are the rest of Pennsylvania. 

Missouri and Kentucky, on the other hand, treat criminals like criminals while Mississippi is lowest in the nation per capita.