CINCINNATI — It was 57 degrees outside in January 2019 when letter carrier Ryan Pierani had a gun pointed at his head.

“I was just having lunch and I heard somebody jiggle my side door of my ProMaster,” he said.

That’s when he saw a kid wearing a mask in his mirror.

“He seen I was there with my window down, he hopped up on the side of my ProMaster and put the pistol to my head and demanded my arrow key,” he said.

Across the country, mail carriers have been targets for their arrow keys. WCPO 9 has reported on the attacks and robberies here in Cincinnati.

Data analyzed by WCPO partner Journal-News showed mail collection box thefts have dropped by 47% year over year in Ohio and robberies of the keys to open the boxes off of postal carriers had dropped by roughly a third from 34 to 23 over the same time period in the state of Ohio.

“Since January of 2022, Branch 43 has had 17 of its members robbed at gunpoint,” said Ted Thompson, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers in Cincinnati.

“We need to keep our letter carriers and postal workers safe,” said Congressman Greg Landsman.

A possible solution to this problem is a new bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Landsman. It aims to make letter carriers and your personal information safer.

It would allocate $1.4 billion to the U.S. Postal Service to install high-security collection boxes and replace older universal keys, known as arrow keys, with electronic versions.

Landsman should the new technology should deter thieves and isn’t too worried someone will figure out a work-a-round.

“The technology is pretty good. The electric key is one of the requires a whole host of things that you can’t just get by stealing the actual key,” he said.

Thompson said this will help keep his members safer.

“It helps devalue the reason that we’re being robbed of, right, so that our equipment and what we carry with us no longer has value to criminals in an attempt to gain access to the public’s mail,” Thompson said.

The second component of this bill has to do with the law.

“It provides additional support for the investigation and prosecution of those who commit these crimes against our letter carriers,” Landsman said.

The bill would direct the U.S. Attorney General to appoint assistant U.S. attorneys in all 94 U.S. judicial districts to lead investigations and prosecutions of crimes against USPS employees, assets and facilities.

It would “also establish new guidelines for the punishment as though a letter carrier being assaulted is the same as a law enforcement officer being assaulted,” Thompson said.

Thompson said of the 17 people who were robbed at gunpoint, four have resigned and one retired.

Pierani was one of the people who came back.

“My coworkers and my customers, getting back to serving them that’s really what drove me to go back,” he said.

“Some of the members I represent they’ve also said because it is a traumatic experience to go through that going back to work was actually helping them in the healing process because sitting at home they were just dwelling on it over, and over, and over again,” Thompson said.

Thompson said they have some electronic keys installed, but the rollout is moving “at a snail’s pace.”

Landsman said if this bill passes it should speed up that process.

Landsman believes this bill will get widespread support. He said conversations with other lawmakers have been serious but optimistic.