Jersey City is now the second worst city in the country for package theft, according to a new study from home security firm Vivint. In a 2020 study, Jersey City ranked third.
To analyze the problem of “porch piracy,” Vivint created a rating system called the porch pirate index, or PPI. The system aggregates the number of searches for the phrases “package stolen,” “package lost,” and “package theft” per 100,000 residents in each U.S. state and the country’s 100 most populated cities. Using this data, Vivint gave each area a PPI score from zero to 100, with zero being the least porch piracy and 100 being the most.
Jersey City placed second nationally, with 115 searches per 100,000 residents and a PPI score of 97.7, behind St. Louis Missouri. Rounding out the top five places for porch pirates were Madison, Wisconsin, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Fremont California.
The ranking won’t come as surprise to many locals. Porch piracy is a hot topic on the neighborhood focused website nextdoor.com. A search for “stolen package” brings up numerous reports of such thefts and attempts to catch the sometimes brazen perpetrators, which include everything from posting videos to foot pursuits.
If the problem of porch pirates is very important to someone, he, she or they might want to move to Houston, Texas which achieved the top score of a mere 19 searches per 100,000 residents.
Vivint also rated delivery services. Amazon was the top scorer, followed in order by UPS, USPS, Fedex and DHL.
Whether porch piracy is indicative of crime generally in Jersey City is difficult to say. Without explanation, the Fulop administration stopped publishing monthly CompStat crime data in June of 2019.
New York City and Newark residents have access to crime data, including shootings, from weekly or monthly CompStat reports posted on their respective websites.