Outdoor Lighting and Crime - Amper

If excessive lighting and lighting waste are seen purely as environmental matters, it could be
argued that enforcement of compliance with outdoor lighting ordinances would properly be
the task of local by-laws officers or environmental health officers. But now that the evidence
points to excessive and obtrusive lighting as a pro-crime factor, enforcement of lighting
controls for crime prevention might more properly be justified as a police task.
Environmental or lighting technologists might be useful or necessary in detecting or
identifying offending installations, but police generally do have an established practical
responsibility in crime prevention and deterrence, in addition to their primary responsibility in
upholding the law.
Penalties for bad lighting practice, including the operation of outdoor lights in daylight, need
to be more than token fines and their imposition needs to have a high probability after new
laws have been introduced with an initial warning provision. Perhaps the most effective
penalty for repeat offences would be compulsory removal of the lights in question, at the
offender’s cost.
7.7.3 Glare reduction
Early introduction of glare reduction programs would appear to have many advantages. It
would pave the way for acceptable lighting reductions with minimal adverse effects on fear of
crime. In the case of fixed lighting installations, public and private, this would require fitting
or retro-fitting of full-cutoff shielding or better, in combination with lower wattage lamps.
Subsidiary benefits of such a program are expected to be fewer mobility accidents and the
freeing up of resources that would otherwise be wasted and unavailable for dealing with the
social issues that lead to crime.
Introduction of such programs might be opposed on the basis, for example, that we have
learnt to cope with things as they are. Apparently widespread acceptance of glare from lowbeam
headlights in the road traffic system is a case in point. An answer to this is that glare
from streetlights and vehicle headlights is undoubtedly a factor in some road traffic accidents
at night. Exposure of drivers to glare of oncoming headlights could be greatly reduced in
much of the road traffic system if the motivation were great enough to overcome the practical
difficulties, eg universal introduction of one-way roads, or divided roads with median-strip
barriers. The fact that much of this might seem unlikely in the short term is no justification
for continuing to accept glare in all other areas of outdoor lighting, especially considering that
the solution is both straightforward and manageable by tying it into luminaire maintenance
and replacement cycles. Full-cutoff luminaires are now available even for outdoor sports
lighting, so a former major objection to broad regulation of glare has been overcome. 100
100 Fully shielded and full-cutoff luminaires typically have a flat lens, which generally has to
be set accurately horizontal. Both types share the characteristic that no part of the lightemitting
face or lens protrudes below the opaque rim of the fitting. Photometric
measurements are required to distinguish the reduced glare of a fully shielded fitting that also
qualifies as a full-cutoff fitting in North American practice.
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