Report Debunks "Myth" About Crime and Well-Lit Streets
Marie Donlon | August 15, 2017
Source: Bidgee / CC BY 3.0We’ve all been warned, particularly by our mothers, from a very young age to travel on well-lit streets to avoid the dangers lurking in the dark. Now, according to a report from Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research, the amount of light on a street may have no bearing on a street’s safety after all.
The report titled "What Happens in the Shadows: Streetlights and How They Relate to Crime" looks at how the number of street lights on the streets of Houston impact crime. Comparing 2015 data about crime rates in the city to the number (high or low) of street lamps on Houston city streets, researchers found that crimes occurred without regard for concentrations of streetlights.
In fact, the results were surprising to researchers who found that streets with higher densities of light experienced roughly 60 percent more nonviolent (i.e., no use of force and no injury) crimes than streets with fewer light densities.
“Our model estimates that on average, irrespective of racial/ethnic composition, neighborhoods with about one light per 100 feet experienced lower crime rates than those neighborhoods with two lights per 100 feet," said Julia Schedler, a graduate student in the Department of Statistics at Rice, a student assistant for the Kinder Institute's Urban Data Platform and one of the paper's authors. "However, the magnitude of this difference varies by a neighborhood's racial composition. Both majority-black and majority-white areas are estimated to experience about one additional nonviolent crime on average, and majority-Hispanic areas are estimated to experience less than one additional nonviolent crime (0.62) on average. Areas with no ethnic majority have the most dramatic increase—about 2.5 additional nonviolent crimes on average. We did not find evidence of a clear relationship between streetlight density and violent crime."
Researchers plan to expand on the research considering factors affecting crime such as property values, distance to commercial areas and median household income.
This must mean that more people walk on well lit streets as opposed to dark unlit roads. That must also mean criminals go where there is more likely to be victims. That's a finding that positively answers one of life's great mysteries for me personally. I think this previously unknown finding requires further study with a very large government grant so that university professors can study the phenomena and write papers on such nonsense to prove that this is indeed the case.
This is not the first time that such a study has been made and both came up with similar results. Lighting is put up to reduce the FEAR of the crime, not just the crime itself.