Police hope package thieves will take the bait as new program rolls out in coordination with Amazon

Porch pirates may think twice about swiping packages from homes in the city, thanks to a new tool in the hands of the Palm Springs Police Department. 

The real-time, motion-activated GPS trackers will be planted inside fake Amazon deliveries provided to the police by Amazon and filled with products. It’s all necessary to help combat thieves in Palm Springs who are participating in the theft of hundreds of millions of packages left on porches in the United States.

“It has to look real,” said Lt. William Hutchinson of the PSPD. “The boxes have product inside of them, so when they’re stolen it meets the threshold for a felony.”

Over the next several weeks, PSPD officers will go through training for the program and then roll out roughly 30 to 60 of the “bait boxes” throughout the city. “We’re working in conjunction with homeowners so the boxes can be placed in front of their properties,” Hutchinson added.

Once one of the boxes is moved, police dispatchers will be notified. And with the live tracking of the box, the department will be able to send officers right to the location to potentially make an arrest.

Sometimes, the boxes will be placed near city-controlled cameras, but cameras aren’t always necessary because of the high-tech motion and location-tracking data, the department said. The tracking devices cost $565 each, and $360 per device annually for the monitoring services. 

While PSPD starts to deploy the bait boxes, residents are also urged to take an active role in protecting their packages by bringing them inside in a timely manner or installing a video doorbell.

The new bait box program follows a similar strategy that the city’s police department is using to prevent bike thefts. Under that program, bikes are locked in a certain location and tagged with a GPS tracker, and police are later alerted when the bike is tampered with or starts moving. 

Hutchinson and PSPD leadership don’t want the new bait box program to be a secret. They want would-be thieves to know these decoys are out there, indistinguishable from the real thing, and that they’re watching. 

“Our goal is that people decide not to steal because of the risk,” Hutchinson said. “We have people monitoring these in real-time, and we’re going to be right on their heels to arrest them.” 

Hutchinson said lieutenants in different parts of the city were recently asked to identify their top priorities, and behind homelessness, bike and package thefts were some of the top issues. “This is our response to addressing those concerns,” Hutchinson said. 

There hasn’t been one particular area of town identified as a hotspot for package thefts, Hutchinson said, so the department is going to start by putting the decoys everywhere.

“Our downtown corridor is a hotspot, but so is the south end and the north end,” he said.

Hutchinson points to Redlands as one city that has had success with a similar program using GPS trackers. The department claims that in the three years following the introduction of the devices, the city saw a 36% decrease in vehicle burglaries.

PSPD hopes its own program will reduce package thefts, though Hutchinson said the department still may not be able to see measurable data for about two years.

“There are so many different factors that go into a reduction of package theft,” he said. “We won’t be able to point to just one thing, but we hope that if we do see a reduction, that can be a good indicator of success.”

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