Street Light Outages, Public Safety and Crime Attraction

ConclusionsDespite strong environmental and social characteristics that tend to tie crime to place, we observe that street light outages are sufficiently salient to disrupt longstanding patterns. While the impact of localized street light outages can reverberate throughout a community, the findings imply that improvements in lighting can be defeated by the displacement of crime to adjacent spaces and therefore do not necessarily suggest that localized investments in municipal street lighting will yield a large public safety dividend.
Source: Journal of Quantitative Criminology - Category: Criminology Source Type: research