Outdoor Lighting and Crime - Amper

owners at least might consider an imposition if they have to pay for it directly. As with
government tax systems, non-compliers would need to face penalty likelihood sufficient to
keep their numbers small. At larger scales, ground-level surveys would become increasingly
unwieldy and costly. Remote sensing technology is better suited to regional and larger scales,
and would appear to be the most practicable and economical method of monitoring
compliance by individual towns, cities and states. ‘League tables’ like Table 6, and likewise
compiled from airborne or satellite sensor data, could provide a reasonably equitable and
relatively inexpensive method for larger-scale management by governments.
The three lighting quantities for which controls have been proposed, here and elsewhere, are:
• excessive outdoor ambient light at night as a crime promoter, health and safety issue
and biodiversity problem,
• excessive waste light travelling through and lighting up the atmosphere as an
aesthetic, scientific and educational problem, and
• excessive energy waste and greenhouse gases emissions associated with inefficient,
wasteful and inappropriate use of lighting.
There is no fixed physical relationship between the three quantities, and satellite data such as
that from the DMSP OLS sensors are different again. Depending on the form of limit set,
individual towns and cities could be disadvantaged or favoured to some extent by the sort of
lighting they choose to operate. A government would need to be quite careful in how it
framed such limits. A poor choice might wrongly favour reduced fear of crime over actual
crime, say, or over energy efficiency. As an example, consider a town entirely lit by
incandescent lamps and another of the same area lit to the same mean illuminance by mercury
vapour lamps in the same kind of luminaires. A VNIR-type sensor in a satellite would find
the town with incandescents much brighter. If a brightness cap applied, that town might be
instructed to cut back regardless of any difference in the respective crime rates. If that town
had full-cutoff fittings and the other used ‘flower pots’, however, the satellite might ‘see’ little
difference. No change would be required, so the people of the second town would continue to
suffer excessive glare and probably an unnecessarily high fear of crime.
Some of these problems might be avoided by the use of spectroradiometric sensors or
luminosity-corrected detectors in satellites. These already exist but other characteristics of the
satellites could be unsuitable for city lights tasks.
7.7.8 CCTV as an alternative for crime deterrence
The effectiveness of closed circuit television (CCTV) systems for crime prevention was
examined in Part 1. Scientific studies generally indicate that CCTV is of quite limited value
for crime deterrence. On average, closed circuit television (CCTV) systems deter only about
4% of crime (Welsh and Farrington 2002), but this result is from a meta-analysis and may
need revision. Supplementary lighting is sometimes installed for the cameras. Ironically,
such lighting may indirectly increase crime. This would confound evaluation of CCTV
effectiveness.
Media publicity is given to the occasional success of CCTV systems in the apprehension and
prosecution of offenders, but the cost of installing and maintaining the cameras, and operating
the monitoring service, generally seems rather high for the results they achieve.
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