When did the F.B.I. stop posting wanted posters in Post Offices?

Richard Watkins, postal spokesman for the Mid-America district, said that most of the nation's 34,000 post offices took the posters off the walls several years ago. "We decided to take them down and keep them in binders behind the counter," Watkins said. "They're still available, but customers have to ask to see them. Of course, they still might be up in smaller, rural post offices." The walls are prime product display space now, he said. A "retail standardization" policy, issued in 1999 and updated in 2005, has prettied up post offices, making them more uniform and attractive — the better to move merchandise.

The FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives began when a newspaper reporter in 1949 asked J. Edgar Hoover for a list of the “toughest guys.” Hoover liked the idea — and the publicity that followed. The last official post office mailing from the FBI was in 2007, said Chris Allen, an FBI public affairs representative in Washington. The Most Wanted list appears online on the FBI’s Web site, Twitter and Facebook. It’s featured on pod casts, widgets, blogs, the TV show “America’s Most Wanted” and digitized billboards. “It’s a whole new frontier. We’ve learned that you go to the people wherever they are,” Allen said.