Outdoor Lighting and Crime - Amper

The Auckland central business district covers about three square kilometres, has a residential
population variously claimed to be 5000 or 6500 and about 59 000 or 68 000 workers
commuting to 7000 businesses. Customers and students add many more thousands (Davis
1998, Maps Group 1999, Donnelly 2002). Auxiliary power of up to a quarter of the normal
load was eventually available via old cables (Gutman 1998). Because many electrically
operated doors had to be propped open or left open to allow access, there was a heavy demand
on security services (Gutman 1998).
Some traffic lights and streetlights were off intermittently. Domestic and retail lighting and
illuminated advertising signs were generally off. There were virtually no retailing, hospitality
or entertainment customers, day or night. Many residents moved out to friends’ homes (Davis
1998). One bomb threat against the power company was taken seriously (Gutman 1998).
Before-after photos on the Internet showed Auckland in its normal lit state, with floodlit
buildings, glary lights and urban skyglow, compared with its much darker limited electrical
power condition. It was not completely dark as there was some skyglow and light trespass
from surrounding city and suburban lighting providing a low level of ambient light, together
with local lighting from many of the streetlights still operating from emergency power
supplies in the central business district. But crime was almost non-existent! 26
As New Zealand police statistics for 1998 were no longer available on the police website,
Auckland police district crime data for March and April of 1997, 1998 and 1999 were kindly
supplied by the police on request. The data were not differentiated by time of day. There is
no discernable effect, increase or decrease, of the power cuts on the recorded total crime.
Subsequent correspondence indicated that the downtown area mentioned by Inspector
Mitchell was only a small part of the total area covered by the data. This would explain part
of the apparent discrepancy between the police report and police data. The remainder of the
discrepancy could indicate spatial displacement of crime from downtown to elsewhere within
the police district, or early redeployment of police to these other places where they were
available to make more arrests there than usual, or both of these.
The apparently immediate reduction in downtown crime following the power failure suggests
a direct effect, but its continuation over subsequent days as well as nights indicates that an
indirect effect also applied. The immediate and sustained effects on commerce could likewise
be considered as a mix of direct and indirect effects. The significance of this will become
apparent in Section 4.4.2.
3.2.2 Massachusetts
The Auckland experience is sufficient to show that Fennelly and Pease are both quite wrong,
although an objection could be raised that this one blackout could have been a unique
aberration. However, there are other known blackouts and brownouts. Answers to Fennelly’s
question were already available on the Internet at the time he was writing, and they certainly
differ from his expectation. For example, early in the 1990s, the towns of Bernardston and
26 The writer contacted New Zealand government authorities, business councils and academic
libraries to ask for quantitative data about the effect of the power failure on customer
numbers, business sales etc. but all of the responses stated that no such data were available.
24