What Happens in the Shadows: Streetlights and How They Relate to Crime

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2017
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Kinder Institute for Urban Research
Abstract

After finding in a previous report, “Streetlights in the City: Understanding the Distribution of Houston Streetlights,” that the city of Houston’s more than 173,000 streetlights were not evenly distributed throughout the city, this next report answers the question: do places with more streetlights have lower crime rates? The findings complicate the common perception that more streetlights lead to fewer crimes. While there was some evidence that a particularly high density of streetlights can provide protective benefits, excluding those extremes provides a much muddier picture, suggesting that crime is a reflection of other neighborhood contexts. As such, cities should be cautious in expecting direct reductions in crime with the introduction of more streetlights.

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Houston has more than 173,000 streetlights across the city, and those are just the ones maintained by CenterPoint Energy. In conversations about public safety, people often point to streetlights as a possible way to deter crime. But in what CityLab called a “seemingly endless debate,” the evidence is mixed. This report confirms that, in Houston, more streetlights don’t necessarily mean less crime.
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O'Connell, Heather. "What Happens in the Shadows: Streetlights and How They Relate to Crime." (2017) Rice University and Kinder Institute for Urban Research: https://doi.org/10.25611/41qx-u9sm.

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