outdoor lighting and crime, part 1 - Astronomical Society of Victoria

It is not at all obvious how or why brighter lighting at night as a claimed crime prevention
measure might displace crime into the much brighter conditions of daylight while there was
also the expectation that crime would be displaced into darker conditions.
High-pressure sodium lights are yet again described as white, but the “older domestic
type tungsten lamps” they replaced in Stoke-on-Trent are actually whiter.
Information not previously given about the Stoke-on-Trent project is that other crime
prevention strategies continued to run during the course of the experiment. These strategies
were monitored but no details are given about how this was done, whether or not they were
a threat to the validity of the experimental results, and what actions were taken if they were
a threat, and when.
Following the Painter and Farrington (2001b) [86] paper are printed comments by a
representative of the lighting company that funded the work. He said he was “glad that
[the work] had a positive outcome” and that it was a powerful tool he hoped would be
used to seek funds for public lighting in the face of competing interventions. 16 Another
commentator wrote of the “good news that it [the paper] brings to those who believe in
the value of lighting.” Revealing though they may be, comments like these appear out of
place in a scientific journal and lower its standing. The authors’ reply then puts the need for
dose-response studies along with interviews of offenders and victims. They might usefully
consider or reconsider the offender interviews described by Ramsay and Newton (1991) [96]
(see Section 3.2), in which lighting was generally discounted as a factor.
An additional serious problem affecting the Dudley and Stoke-on-Trent studies is described
in Section 5.2 below. Meanwhile, any one or more of the several shortcomings
already described may be sufficiently serious to invalidate the conclusions, regardless of
Scientific Methods Scores, the number of variables studied and the sophistication of the statistical
analysis. Most of the findings of the two studies appear to be unreliable, including
the supposed cost savings brought about by relighting expenditure. The effects of brighter
lighting in increasing pedestrian numbers and reducing fear of crime might be thought reasonable
and innocuous, but there is more on this in Section 5.2, and much more to come in
Part 2 of this work.
4.5 PEASE (1998, 1999)
The two works [89, 90] discussed here are reviews rather than experiments. They are included
because they give further insights into lighting and crime experiments, especially
the Dudley and Stoke-on-Trent studies, and the influence of Situational Crime Prevention
theory.
Pease (1999) [90] reviewed the lighting and crime literature and claimed that Painter’s
recent research provided firm evidence that where street lighting improvements were successful,
they reduced crime by day as well as at night, probably because of changes in street
use, enhanced community pride and sense of area ownership. Pease’s re-analysis of the data
also suggested that beneficial lighting effects are greater in chronically victimised areas.
Pease (1999) drew attention to the “rash” of existing reviews on lighting and crime while
adding another. Apart from typographical errors and other signs of hasty preparation, the
many more serious faults in his review virtually guarantee that more reviews will follow. An
16 Presumably this refers to CCTV.
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