Outdoor Lighting and Crime - Amper

to the succession of shop windows and awning lights. Intense commercial lighting makes the
footpaths along Bourke and Russell Streets generally brighter at night than is the case
elsewhere in the city and suburbs, with the exceptions of lighting hotspots such as shopping
malls, railway stations, convenience stores and the like, most of which appear to be
overrepresented in news media reports as crime locations.
In Bourke Street, subsequent on-site inspection indicated that the position of the arrest
locations tended to have fast food outlets, high-volume shops, and large stores on one or both
sides of the street. While this applies to much of the street, another common factor is that the
arrest locations tended to coincide with places on one or both sides of the street that were
brightly lit at their street frontages at night and sometimes also in daytime. Not all of these
places are routinely open for business at night, but their lights are often left on regardless.
In Russell Street, the arrest locations are close to amusement parlours, fast food outlets, bars,
shops, movie theatres and other brightly lit places. In summary for both streets, the proximity
of brightly lit ‘people magnets’ appears to be a factor in the arrest locations. The present data
do not allow direct testing of this association but basic formal tests are possible with the
information at hand.
The statistical data for Figures 15 and 16 are given in Tables 10 and 11. Given the lack of
data about multiple arrests, the drug arrest locations were all treated as though there were only
single arrests there. The statistical tests are comparisons of the mean and variance of
illuminance at arrest locations and the mean and variance of illuminance along the length of
the respective streets. According to the hypothesis, the mean illuminance for the arrest
locations should be higher than the mean illuminance for the whole street, and the variance of
the arrest location illuminances should be less than for the whole street because of the
avoidance of low values.
For the illuminance data, a non-significant opposite trend was observed in Bourke Street but
the variances of the street and arrest distributions were significantly different. The
interpretation of this is that the arrest locations avoided the illuminance extremes, maxima as
well as minima, along the street. For the Bourke Street logarithmic data, the difference in the
means was in the predicted direction and although relatively larger, still non-significant. In
this case the variances remained different in the expected direction, but not reliably so. It is
possible that the large advertising sign responsible for the highest peak in Figure 15 tends to
confound the test because of its corner location: only one of the 19 arrests was close to a
major intersection and that one was not at the intersection with the sign. Of the four tests for
Bourke Street, one reliably disproves the null hypothesis in the direction expected, so the
conclusion is that the new hypothesis gets some qualified support.
For Russell Street, the difference in the illuminance variances is contrary to the prediced
direction but non-significant. The remaining three tests clearly allow confident rejection of
the null hypothesis and strongly support the new hypothesis.
For the results obtained, it appears likely that taking account of multiple arrests at some
locations would increase the strength of the findings. This would also seem likely to be the
case if the pooling of arrest locations and illuminances across the street could be
circumvented.
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