Porch Pirates Beware - December, 2023

We truly hope this month's newsletter finds everyone happy and well.

First and foremost, we would like to wish everyone a happy holiday season.  How ever you celebrate, the Callaway County Sheriff's Office truly wishes you and yours a safe and wonderful holiday.  We hope you all enjoy the Christmas parades, neighborhood light displays, the trees at Veterans Park and so on.

This wouldn't be much of a Sheriff's Office Newsletter if we didn't provide some cautionary tale.  However, I can also provide our readers with an unusual update to one of our most usual laws.

Every year around this time, we see more scams and more package thefts.  A new thing we are seeing is a text from the US Postal Service saying that the delivery address is incorrect.  Let's stop and think about this....  The postal service somehow knows my phone number, entered it into an automated texting system and then generated an automatic text message when the POSTAL SERVICE did not have my address.  That is ridiculous.  DELETE!

Now, what about that law?  The Missouri State Legislature watched and listened and ultimately did this....

  6.  The offense of stealing is a class E felony if:

  (4)  The property appropriated is a letter, postal card, package, bag, or other sealed article that was delivered by a common carrier or delivery service and not yet received by the addressee or that had been left to be collected for shipment by a common carrier or delivery service.

Please treat each other well and don't make us make you a felon because you decided to steal a Christmas card.

We'll see you all in 2024!

Always at your service,

The Callaway County Sheriff's Office