Are you sure you're citing the right statute? That one reads, "Whoever knowingly violates section 5136A
[1] of the Revised Statutes of the United States, section 9A of the
Federal Reserve Act, or section 20 of the
Federal Deposit Insurance Act shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both. "
Thank you for checking - it indeed was a typo. The correct code is 3061, which you were also considerate enough to include in your post, and I appreciate you doing that as well.
Not really, because they never had the authority to begin with. The fact that they were doing it is irrelevant.
I ran through several different interpretations of 'property', how it is used within the Postal Service, and how specifically it seems to be interpreted in the context of this part of the code.
Firstly, the Postal Police Officer position has since its inception in 1970 exercised law enforcement authority in regards to off-estate compromises to mail delivery and the safety of its employees. This is ultimately irrelevant if the current statues don't explicitly support this statement, but feeds into part of the PPOA's argument in the case.
Secondly, property certainly seems to include everything from real estate to mail trucks to the mail itself, and the wording on nearly every Postal Police description I can find includes some iteration of exercising arrest authorities during mail-in-transit or assaults on USPS personnel outside of USPS real estate. This also apparently includes handbooks internal to USPIS that explicitly mention in-transit protection for mail and personnel as among the duties of PPOs.
The PPOA is arguing that Congress, being aware of these duties practiced by PPOs for decades, did not intend to restrict those practiced authorities when they wrote the law, and that this is reflected in the legislative history. However, all I can find are changes from "buildings and areas owned or occupied by the Postal Service or under the charge and control of the Postal Service" to "property" replacing "buildings and areas". PPOs meanwhile openly and even with citations exercised law enforcement authority off-property even while these initial pushes towards the current legislation were floating around in the 1990s.
I can believe that Congress was aware of what PPOs did in practice, and I can also definitely believe that these practices could have become such a widespread ongoing industry norm that an agency head suddenly halting it would be a shock. However, I am now not convinced as I previously was that the language is pliant enough to hamstring DeJoy if he wants to limit PPO LE authority to the USPS real estate and outside areas only in support of the real estate and its personnel only.
This is probably one of the weakest parts of their suit.
@compforce, consider that a long-winded way of saying I have come to agree with you on this point.
The fact that they were doing it is irrelevant.
Assuming the above holds, agreed.
Even the Deputy Chief Postal Inspector admitted he didn't know if they had jurisdiction outside the post office, and that's quite telling.
This beautifully illustrates the disparity in the way that different leaders within the agency understand the range of authority given to PPOs.
According the PPOA, a head of Postal Police Officers apparently said during court in 2016 to “Think of them as a fully functioning police department whose responsibilities are security for postal facilities, protection of postal employees, protection of the mail in transit, preventing the use of mails for illegitimate purposes, mailing child pornography, mailing drugs through the mail.”
If anything, DeJoy's timely decision to enforce the law by halting afterhours mail transit and personnel protections ahead of a mail-in-ballot-heavy voting season is a shrewd but ostensibly legally supported move.
Frankly, you don't want postal police officers acting as municipal cops. That would be bad mojo.
Given that they've apparently been exercising law enforcement powers outside of USPS real estate for 50 years now, I think it's safe to say that that mojo is not a thing in practice, considering how sparingly that multiple USPS-adjacent people on this very thread have even encountered them to the point of openly doubting they even practiced in that capacity.
I also think if Congress decided to formally recognize in law what they've apparently been doing for 50 years that it wouldn't be unfeasible to add extremely restrictive language to that to keep their powers from becoming an ongoing municipal jurisdiction problem - assuming they even grow the ranks to make that a possibility.
