Effects of Improved Street Lighting on Crime
By Brandon P. Welsh, David Farrington, David B. Wilson, G. Mason. 2008
218 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Improved street lighting serves many functions and is used in both public and private settings. The prevention of personal and property crime is one of its objectives in public space, which is the main focus of this review. There are two main theories of why improved street lighting may cause a reduction in crime. The first suggests that improved lighting leads to increased surveillance of potential offenders (both by improving visibility and by increasing the number of people on the street) and hence to increased deterrence of potential offenders. The second suggests that improved lighting signals community investment in the area and that the area is improving, leading to increased community pride, community cohesiveness, and informal social control. The first theory predicts decreases in crime especially during the hours of darkness, while the second theory predicts decreases in crime during both daytime and nighttime. Results of this review indicate that improved street lighting significantly reduces crime. This lends support for the continued use of improved street lighting to prevent crime in public space. The review also found that nighttime crimes did not decrease more than daytime crimes. This suggests that a theory of street lighting focusing on its role in increasing community pride and informal social control may be more plausible than a theory focusing on increased surveillance and increased deterrence. Future research should be designed to test the main theories of the effects of improved street lighting more explicitly, and future lighting schemes should employ high quality evaluation designs with long-term followups.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4a7b7b5d1fae289c65317ae82ef8e089c35f5667
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Is light pollution driving moth population declines? A review of causal mechanisms across the life cycle (2020, background): “Outdoor lighting carries numerous societal benefits, such as preventing traffic collisions (Wanvik, 2009; Yannis et al., 2013), reducing crime (Welsh & Farrington, 2008) and increasing perceived public safety, particularly for marginalised groups (Trench et al., 1992; Painter, 1996).”
- Place value: place quality and its impact on health, social, economic and environmental outcomes (2018, background): “…and farrington (1999). improved street lighting, crime and displacement improved street lighting reduced crime and no displacement to adjacent areas Welsh and farrington (2008) improved street lighting and day time and night time crime improved street lighting increased community pride and…”