Delivering mail is becoming more dangerous in Texas

NORTH TEXAS — Delivering mail is becoming more dangerous. There have been five new violent attacks on Texas letter carriers in the last month. Three of them happened in North Texas.

It was during a routine mail delivery on April 4 in the neighborhood on the 7500 block of Stonebrook Parkway in Frisco that a letter carrier was ambushed by someone with a gun and robbed of their arrow key.

The arrow key is a master key carried by postal workers that opens most public collection boxes and community mailboxes.

"Every day you have a letter carrier with a gun stuck in his or her face demanding those arrow keys," said Frank Albergo, with the Postal Police Officers Association. "It's a very dangerous situation."

Albergo is the national president of the Postal Police Officers Association. He's calling on the US Postal Service to reassign its police force of more than 350 officers who are currently guarding post offices, to what he believes is a more urgent role of monitoring letter carriers on high-risk routes.

"There are postal police officers in Dallas so that makes no sense," Albergo said. "So if there were postal police officers in Dallas why wouldn't you use the. It makes no sense ... It's the big cities where they are being attacked and that's where postal police are."

In February, North Texas letter carriers held a rally outside the main post office in Dallas demanding action to address their security concerns.

CBS News Texas learned of more than a dozen robberies this year in the DFW area alone.

The arrow keys allow criminals to steal mail containing checks that can easily be forged and cashed.

"Can postal officers stop all attacks on letter carriers? No," said Albergo. "Can we stop all the mail theft? No. But, can we make a dent? Of course, we can."

During a hearing this week in Washington, the postmaster general told senators that with 200,000 male delivery routes in the US, there's no way to protect all of its letter carriers.

But as long as the arrow keys have a high value to thieves, letter carriers will continue to be a vulnerable and easy target.