A six-month, $5 million experiment conducted at about 40 New York City public-housing developments found that installing streetlights reduced nighttime serious crime by as much as 59 percent.
The setting sun is reflected off buildings along the lower Manhattan skyline in New York City. By Andrew Van Dam Andrew Van Dam Reporter focusing on economic data Email Bio Follow May 14 at 10:08 PM For years, New York City public housing residents had requested more streetlights. In 2016, they arrived — in the form of portable, diesel-powered flood lights that blast 600,000 lumens into the night sky. For comparison, a bright indoor lamp might put out 1,600 lumens.
The researchers placed an average of seven mobile light towers in each development, affecting an estimated 40,000 residents total. Even when they considered a larger two-block radius around each development, in case criminals shifted their activity to avoid the lights, they found a reduction of at least 36 percent.Almost three-quarters of the crimes economists measured were felony assaults and robberies.
“Researchers have been the studying the effects of street lighting on crime for decades, but this is the first time that there has been a randomized experiment that provides policymakers with the type of high-quality evidence that is required to make informed choices,” Chalfin said. Caught in the headlights The economists write that street lighting outages were the third most common complaint fielded by the city’s 311 operators between 2010 and 2016. Some saw that as an indication that residents, particularly those in public housing, knew they needed improved residential lighting long before the city’s massive experiment.
“If there was a dearth of street lighting on the Upper West Side, would the mayor’s office have dreamed up a response in consult with the NYPD and invited outside researchers to do a randomized controlled trial?” Under cover of darkness Perhaps the best demonstration of light’s effect on crime to date was a 2015 analysis in Review of Economics and Statistics by Texas A&M’s Jennifer Doleac and Nicholas Sanders of Cornell University. The economists found when daylight saving time effectively shifted light from morning to evening, daily robberies fell by 7 percent. The effect was strongest during the evening hours that were suddenly light when they had been dark just days earlier.
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