Street lighting may enable rather than hinder street crime

Street lights and cars - Fewer cars are broken into at night on roads with part-night lighting (PNL), where street lights are switched off between midnight and 5am, finds researchers from UCL and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The rate of thefts from cars at night was halved on roads with PNL, compared to the same roads before PNL was introduced. Car break-ins decreased from an average of 12 per street, per month, to six per street, per month. This coincided with a 1.5x increase in vehicle crime on nearby roads where the lighting remained on all night, suggesting some criminals are deciding to move to better-lit streets nearby. For the paper, published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology , the team, led by UCL and the LSHTM as part of the LANTERNS project, examined detailed police recorded crime data from Thames Valley Police and data on changes to street lighting in Oxfordshire and west Berkshire from April 2004 to September 2013. LANTERNS is a national collaboration between LSHTM and UCL Security & Crime Science that aims to quantify any effects of changes in street lighting on road traffic crashes and crimes. They also found that fewer crimes were displaced to nearby roads, meaning there was an overall net reduction in crime.