Outdoor Lighting and Crime - Amper

2. GROWTH IN LIGHTING AND IN CRIME
Whatever the relationship, if any, between outdoor lighting and crime, it seems reasonable
that the way these and related quantities have varied over the last century or more should be
known and understood as a highly desirable precondition for studies of the present situation.
As it happens, the required historical data tend to be sparse, beset by discontinuities and other
inconsistencies, and difficult to track down. For many countries, the records for recent years
are hardly any better, if they exist at all.
For periods of up to a year or so used to date in the ‘before’ and ‘after’ phases of the fieldbased
studies reviewed in Part 1, it appears that relatively small increments in outdoor
lighting have not been reliably demonstrated either to decrease or increase actual crime.
Here, changes occurring over much longer intervals in lighting and crime are examined.
Ramsay and Newton (1991, p 12) commented on the steep rise in crime in the UK following
WW2 while major street lighting improvements were taking place. As they put it, this
“scarcely suggests that street lighting improvements are of great importance in preventing
crime”. The co-occurrence of the increases suggests more than this, viz that there is a positive
(ie adverse) correlation between lighting and crime. If there is a persistent correlation, then it
could be useful to know why.
Others have noticed that urban crime rates and outdoor lighting both increased substantially
during the twentieth century. Perhaps the notion of a connection has been dismissed each
time at the outset as contrary to common knowledge that lighting reduces crime, and therefore
fanciful. Regardless, the issue seems to be worth another look now that the best short-term
studies have been exposed as rather inconclusive or unconvincing. Time-series measures of
lighting and crime need to be examined for evidence of association and causality.
Availability of reliable data determines how far back such assessments can be taken. Here,
attention is limited to periods starting at least a decade after the initial introduction of electric
lighting.
Many older people are able to recall that their childhood hometown skies had far more stars
than is now the case. There is no doubt that their loss is a result of a great increase in outdoor
lighting, but it is also important to know how this change has progressed. If the forms of
long-term increase for lighting, crime and other potentially important factors such as the
economy are sufficiently different, it may allow disentangling of possible causality.
2.1 OUTDOOR LIGHTING
2.1.1 Brief history
Prehistoric campfires provided warmth, light and a degree of safety at night against attack by
wild animals. The flames doubtless acted also as beacons for late-returning hunters and,
rather less beneficially, for hostile warriors from other tribes.
Fixed urban outdoor lighting at night was instituted in Paris of the 1660s by Louis XIV as a
supposed crime prevention measure (D’Allemagne 1891). Candles gave way to oil lamps in
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