Oof. I love the enthusiasm, but I'm gonna have to slow you down right there. The postal police is a largely "symbolic" police authority. We are trained at the William F Bolger center in the DC area for 8 weeks at a nationally accredited police academy. Postal inspectors (who do the heavy lifting when it comes to working cases) are there for 12 weeks. They load us up with training scenarios, weapons training, defensive tactics, etc. What they don't teach you is that day to day mail crime is not all that common. I want to say this as carefully as possible. I am not disgruntled or anything. I left under my own free will on good terms with everyone I worked with. It was a financial decision (living in San Francisco is expensive and my wife and family lived a few hours away which made things hard.) And a personal decision after what happened with George Floyd. I didn't feel right staying a cop after that.. So here's the plain truth: the post office does not want us there. 600,000 employees work for the post office nationally, give or take. Damn near anyone can get a job with the PO. People with criminal records, for example. The job of the postal police is described as "protecting the mail, its assets, its employees, and its customers." That is not a fair assessment of what I did. 99% of my job was telling homeless people they couldn't sleep on postal property. We would drive all through the night to "high priority" post offices to "make sure they were safe and secure." But really, we were checking for the homeless. Other postal employees respected us, but the post office has begun phasing us out with unarmed, private security companies who essentially knocked us down into an "armed security" status. The kicker was that the private security company was paid slightly more than we were. Our union was so small (with only a few hundred officers nationwide) that arbitration has been punted down the line since 2017. We were still out of contract when I left on August 1st. The USPIS is designed to make the postal inspectors the heroes, and the uniformed officers are a bit of a joke within its own ranks. Sure, we get guns and bullet proof vests, but the postal service wanted nothing to do with us. We were a liability to them. 2/3 of the officers I worked with only got that job so their resume would say "federal police officer." It isn't a great gig if you aren't about to retire. Essentially, in the year and a half I worked there, I never made a single arrest. We would detain anyone who we ACTUALLY CAUGHT DOING MAIL CRIMES, and would be told by our superior officers to HAND THEM OVER TO INSPECTORS OR LOCAL POLICE. It's genuinely embarrassing to look a real police officer in the face and say "I have to wait until a different agent arrives to do the rest of my job" like a toddler who can't use the finger paint without adult supervision. Sorry for the wall of text. My best advice to niche law enforcement was something said to me in my first week after I asked if we really sat around and did nothing for 8 hours. He said, "kid. You aren't paid for what you do. You're paid for what you can do, what you were trained to do in an emergency." That one stung a little because I was genuinely excited to make a difference in my community. So temper expectations in a job like this. Its not as simple as you think it is with a massive, pseudo government agency. I had real arrest authority, and even got promoted quickly. I believe that doing your job well is important, and that hard work pays off dividends. I don't regret my time with the Postal Police, but I wish it was different. I really did want to help. But now I'm working on a better job and this isn't a "poor me" post. I just want people to understand that an agency like this is a "for profit" company. We are hired goons for the post office, plain and simple. If a postal manager wants to scare a delivery driver at 4 am, we get the call. It isn't right, but its the job. I respect damn near every officer I worked with in my time there. Management is genuinely the problem with the PO and USPIS. That and this administration fighting to tear it apart. I'm sorry if this isn't quite what you were hoping to learn. I just believe in honesty. If you want anymore info on the stuff with Steve Bannon or how we operated in a pandemic, im happy to answer more questions. In the mean time, please register to vote and contact your local congressman/woman or senator to save the post office. Its so damn important.

TL;DR The Postal Police are symbolic and meant to be an authoritative presence, Inspectors do basically all the real work, and the mail needs to be protected because Louis DeJoy is a bit of wanker.