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The Brian Lehrer Show

Are "Porch Pirates" Stealing Your Packages?

The Brian Lehrer Show

WNYC

Arts, Lerer, Radio, York, Wnyc, News, Media, New, Npr, Nyc, Bryan, News Commentary, Politics, Daily News, Public

4.71.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As the holiday season kicks into full gear, writer Julie Besonen, freelance writer and contributor to the New York Times, joins us to discuss her article on how package theft made her building band together. Plus, we hear from callers about their own disappearing deliveries.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Brian Lear on WNYC Package Theth. Those of you who live in buildings, can you even make it through

0:16.7

your lobbies yet with all the holiday season packages from Amazon and wherever starting to pile up

0:24.2

or those of you who live in private homes, can you make it through your porch?

0:28.5

But our real question is, do you deal with a lot of package theft?

0:31.7

Has this become a bigger issue for you and your neighbors in recent months or years?

0:37.1

Also tips for how you can deal with it

0:40.2

so that other listeners can take a page out of perhaps the success in your package theft prevention

0:47.7

book. Building supers, landlords, residents, private homeowners. I know package theft happens, you know, in both contexts.

0:56.9

Maybe some of you have even heard of the New York City Department of Transportation's pilot program

1:01.3

Locker, NYC, where they're setting up public lockers to help ensure safe delivery. But joining us now

1:10.4

to talk about this is Julie Bessonan, who has an article in the New York

1:15.8

Times, actually from a few years ago, about how her East Village building came together to address

1:22.7

a rampant package theft problem there and then. Hey, Julie, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

1:28.7

Hi, thanks for having me. So do you have a success story? We had some success. No, it's a problem

1:36.9

all over again because my building has a lot of turnover since it's close to NYU and Cooper Union,

1:43.6

so we get a new batch of students,

1:46.3

usually every fall. And so we successfully battled it in 2021. The package stuff got terrible

1:53.1

during the pandemic. And so we banded together and started taking in packages for each other,

1:59.9

carrying them up the stairs.

2:01.6

And that really seemed to work. We got our landlord to put in a camera so we could see how they were getting in.

2:07.6

And in one case, a man who's still one of my packages was just able to open the front door with either a credit card or a metro card. And so they fix the lock.

2:20.0

But now it's happening again. And we have new residents who are putting up signs saying,

...

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