Maybe it shouldn’t have taken $5 million and the use of gigantic, portable diesel-powered outdoor floodlights to prove it, but the evidence is in: Extra light at nighttime can reduce serious crimes.
The Washington Post reports that a six-month experiment in New York City placed the portable floodlights at 40 randomly chosen public housing developments. There were an average of seven floodlights at each location.
Most of the crimes being tracked were felony assaults and robberies. Others included homicides, vehicle theft and burglary. The extra lights reduced nighttime crime by 59 percent.
One obvious question would be whether criminals simply moved a few blocks away from the floodlights. When researchers looked at police reports in a two-block radius around public housing, they found that serious crimes had gone down by at least 36 percent.
The Post said the decrease in crime is about what researchers would expect if a city increased its police presence by 10 percent. It’s obvious that improving the lights is a lot less expensive than hiring more patrol officers.
It must have been an annoying six months for public-housing residents who had to endure the all-night floodlights, which were about 400 times as bright as a strong indoor light. But street light outages have been the third-most-frequent complaint phoned into the city, so the problem was obvious.
New York City has already acted on the results of the six-month test. It has installed those bright new LED streetlights at some public housing developments and plans to put them in at other locations, including most that had the portable floodlights for six months. This will cost $54 million.
Small-town Mississippi is, of course, different from New York City, but the lesson of this report is obvious: An investment in lighting will create an immediate expense, but it also can discourage crime. This is a strategy cities of all sizes should review.
