Outdoor Lighting and Crime - Amper

aimed lighting used for advertising, architectural, structural and decorative purposes.
Lighting waste can be reduced by ensuring that all outdoor luminaires including streetlights
and sports floodlighting have full-cutoff shielding. Canting of full-cutoff luminaires should
be prohibited.
To reduce ambient light sufficiently, illuminated advertising signs will need to have lamps
replaced by lower power types or removed outright until the appropriate criterion in Table 12,
Section 7.4 is met. All upwardly aimed floodlights should be decommissioned in any case.
For individual properties, all-night security lighting should be removed, and all windows and
skylights should be fitted with opaque curtains, drapes or shutters to block escape of room
light at night. 109 Unhindered escape of indoor light from multi-story buildings should be
subject to severe sanctions with rigorous enforcement. If porch, garden or pathway lighting is
required for finding keyholes, mobility safety etc., the lowest acceptable lamp wattage should
be used and movement-sensor switching incorporated.
Emission of waste light from ships, particularly cruise ships, should be strictly limited while
the ships are in national waters.
Lighting reduction must be made mandatory by national laws that include key technical
performance limits rather than reference to separate documents. Experience indicates that
voluntary compliance is most unlikely to succeed. Enforcement should be sufficient to ensure
a high level of compliance
9.12 SKYBEAMS AND LASER DISPLAYS
Commercial, advertising, celebratory, memorial and fund-raising outdoor use of searchlights,
skybeams and laser beam displays should be banned outright as it is environmentally
damaging and a completely avoidable contribution to the lighting, commerce and crime cycle.
If a sufficient case for exception can be made for individual instances of outdoor laser beam
displays, and this should be rare and for a limited duration, no part of the light beam should be
permitted to travel at or above the horizontal, and wildlife, including birds, should be proteced
from exposure. Use of conventional or laser light beams for genuine scientific and technical
purposes including navigational guidance does not represent a crime problem and should not
be affected.
9.13 CCTV AS AN ALTERNATIVE FOR CRIME PREVENTION
Scientific studies generally indicate that closed circuit television (CCTV) systems are of quite
limited value for crime deterrence. Their functions of crime recording, protection of
individuals and apprehension and prosecution of offenders are costly. Supplementary lighting
109 In the interest of efficacy of indoor lighting and perhaps temperature control, the inside
surfaces of these waste light blockers should preferably be highly reflective. Hollan (2003)
has long advocated aluminium sheet for use as such shutters because of its relatively high
reflectance. Some countries have found it necessary to limit the reflectance of external
surfaces of buildings, including windows, because of glare from reflected sunlight, so any
highly reflective surface might need to be limited to inside surfaces.
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