SAN ANTONIO – San Antonio is taking another step toward cracking down on city-wide mailbox break-ins.

On Tuesday, city officials heard a proposal to help stop thieves before they grab the first envelope.

District 7 councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito gave the city’s Public Safety Committee a briefing on a proposal to crack down on mail theft, including cluster mailbox break-ins.

She said it’s a process that’s been in the works for a year.

“When I first brought this proposal forward in the fall of 2024, it was because residents in district 7 and across the city were getting hit with cluster mailbox theft again and again,” Alderete Gavito said to the committee.

We’ve brought you several stories over the years about mail theft here in San Antonio.

“All of my personal information, you know, my credit card, my bills… We’ve been a victim of identity theft before, and this could have probably been the reason,” Javier Gomez told us in 2024.

Surveillance video from an east side apartment complex shows the moments thieves broke into mailboxes last weekend. Councilwoman Alderete Gavito is working with SAPD and CPS Energy to stop thieves from making it that far.

“We don’t want to keep replacing these mailboxes again and again just to have them broken into, right?,” she asked. “We wanted to get to the root of the issue.”

This comes from a drafted Council Consideration Request (CCR), which is how councilmembers get items added to meeting agendas for official action.

Under the cluster mailbox, CCR councilwoman Alderete Gavito proposed two solutions to the issue.

“The short-term solution is for the City of San Antonio to partner with CPS Energy to install what’s called ANSL lighting (All Night Security Lighting) around these cluster mailboxes…,” she explained. “The long-term solution, what we did was we formed a task force.”

That task force — formed with the help of SAPD Deputy Chief Michelle Ramos. We reached out to the CPS team for a statement about the ANSL system, but did not hear back by our deadline.

“A lot of the frustration from the residents is, they didn’t know how to report it. Or, they didn’t know to report it to SAPD,” Deputy Chief Ramos said. “They thought they were just supposed to report it to USPS. So, one of the recommendations is putting that information out there.”

Deputy Chief Ramos said the department is putting together a new website to help with that process.

Now the CCR will head to the full council for approval as officials hope to put a stop to this growing problem.

“It’s not just mail,” she said. “A lot of times, they’re looking for your credit cards. They’re looking for your ID. Some people are having medications delivered to their residences. So, a lot of these crimes lead to other crimes.”

Councilwoman Alderete Gavito said this took longer than she would’ve liked because of the back-and-forth discussion with Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones about the CCR process.

“This cluster mailbox CCR is a perfect example of a CCR filed a while back,” Alderete Gavito said. “But we needed to continue the work to solve resident concerns. Residents’ concerns don’t go away just because we elect a new mayor, right? We needed to continue the work, and we’ve done that and made good progress on it.”

Now that things are running smoothly, she said she’s looking forward to residents finally getting some relief.