Whether in alleys, barnyards, backyards, front yards, or driveways, the white 175-watt, dusk-to-dawn security light is ubiquitous in the United States. Drive into the country and they are often the only lights you see. I remember as a child traveling south with my parents from Minneapolis to the southern Illinois farm country where my grandparents lived. If we went at Christmas we traveled long hours after dark, and I would press my face to the backseat glass, cup my eyes, and stare at the stars. Somehow, the solitary white lights that dotted the black landscape seemed part of the romance, like bits of starry sky fallen to earth.
But that romantic view hid the reality: The fact that I could see them hundreds of yards away speaks to the glare these lights cast in all directions, including far beyond the boundaries of the property for which they were meant to provide security.
During the three years I taught at a small college in Ashland, I lived within walking distance of my office and often would take the alleyway five blocks there and back, passing right under a security light. This light was ostensibly designed to illuminate a driveway and a garage basketball hoop, and I used to imagine the swish and clank and splat of a solitary sharpshooter hitting net, rim, and puddle. But I never saw this person; I only saw, from blocks away, the light casting its shadows and glare into neighboring yards and houses. Approaching the light, I would have to shield my eyes, losing whatever dark adaptation I’d gained. I never did ask the neighbors what they thought of this light. My guess? They were so used to it they no longer noticed.
That we don’t notice glaring lights anymore has direct ramifications for light pollution, of course, but in terms of safety and security, because we are so used to bright lighting, we won’t notice if anything out of the ordinary is taking place. In fact, we won’t think to look or even want to look. And if no one is looking, lighting will do next to nothing for security.
For example, think of the many industrial warehouses spread outside every city and small town that stand unattended all weekend, every weekend. With few exceptions they will be ringed with lights, far too often wallpacks—those rectangular-shaped lighting fixtures plastered to the sides of buildings all over the country that blast horizontal light onto parking lots, plazas, courtyards … and far beyond those areas. But without a human presence—without someone watching—those lights do little more than provide illumination a criminal would need. So much so that David Crawford, founder of the International Dark-Sky Association, calls this “criminal-friendly lighting.”
The joke I heard in London is that criminals actually prefer to work in well-lighted areas because they, too, feel safer. Studies bear this out: Light allows criminals to choose their victims, locate escape routes, and see their surroundings. Asked in one study what factors deterred them from targeting a house, criminals listed “belief that house is occupied,” “presence of alarms or CCTV/camera outside the property,” and, to a lesser extent, the “apparent strength of doors/window locks.” Nowhere did they mention the presence of lighting.
“It works both ways, you see,” the CfDS’s Bob Mizon told me. “The people who claim benefits from lighting, they never put themselves in the mind of the criminal—what does he or possibly she need? What does a burglar need, what does a rapist or a mugger need? They need to assess the victim; they need to see what they’re doing. I mean, who benefits most from a big security light at three o’clock in the morning? Is it the resident fast asleep indoors, or is it the burglar sorting his tools under the light?”
Makes sense, I said, but when I look at the webpage for the police department in the suburb where my parents live, the first thing listed under preventative measures a homeowner can take: “Home is illuminated with Exterior Lights.”
The police in his town offer the same message, Mizon explained: “You must have lights to prevent crime. And when asked about the source of this information, the data, they haven’t got any. They just assume it’s true. The police are mired in the same degree of ignorance as society.”
This doesn’t mean that the Campaign for Dark Skies is against artificial light.
“It’s not as though we want people stumbling about in medieval darkness,” Mizon said, smiling. “I mean we don’t campaign for no lights. That’s crazy. If people want lights they should have them. It’s a democracy; people fought and died for it. Let’s say everybody in the village votes for street lighting. Great, they must have it. But it’s got to be the right stuff. And that’s what many people don’t realize, that there’s lighting, and then there’s lighting.”
Helping people understand this is a large part of Mizon’s job.
“I say to them, look, there are thousands of little villages in England with no streetlights—are they hot spots of crime? No, they are not. And when you see crime on the television or you see people rioting in city centers or fighting each other on the CCTV cameras and vomiting in the gutters, are those dark places? No, they’re brightly lit places. They’re the brightest places in Britain, and they are the most crime-ridden places in Britain. So what’s the conclusion? Does light prevent crime? Of course not, it’s rubbish.”
Overall, the available studies and statistics back Mizon’s claim, and echo what several people told me, that the term “security lighting” is simply oxymoronic because it assumes a link between security and lighting that research does not support.
In 1977, a U.S. Department of Justice report found that “there is no statistically significant evidence that street lighting impacts the level of crime.” In 1997, a U.S. National Institute of Justice report concluded, “We may speculate that lighting is effective in some places, ineffective in others, and counterproductive in others.” In 2000, the city of Chicago performed a study in which an attempt was made to “reduce crime through improved street and alley lighting.” The city found that “there did not appear to be a suppression effect on crime as a result of increased alley lighting.” In 2002, Australian astronomer Barry Clark conducted an exhaustive review of the research available and concluded that there is “no compelling evidence” that lighting reduces crime and, in fact, “good evidence that darkness reduces crime.”
How shielding our lights cuts out glare and improves our vision (notice the “bad guy” standing in the open gate). (George Fleenor)
In late 2008, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) was required by California law to find ways to reduce energy expenditures. In an effort to look into how the reduction of street lighting might do so, company representatives asked for and received an independent review of existing research “relating to any relationship between night-time outdoor lighting and security.” The review found no research that presented “sufficient evidence to demonstrate a causal link between night-time lighting and crime” and concluded: “the available results show a mixed picture of positive and negative effects of lighting on crime, most of which are not statistically significant. This suggests either that there is no link between lighting and crime, or that any link is too subtle or complex to have been evident in the data, given the limited size of the studies undertaken.”
As Barry Clark argued in 2002, “Where the justification includes or implies crime prevention,” lighting costs “appear to be a waste of public and private funds.” Updating his review in 2011, he reiterated his earlier findings and wrote, “Given the invalidity of evidence for a beneficial effect and the clear evidence to the contrary, advocating lighting for crime prevention is like advocating use of a flammable liquid to try to put out a fire.”
These studies have had little effect, however, on the perception that lighting reduces crime at night, and that more light reduces crime further. Perhaps that’s because most of us have never heard of these studies, and so continue to assume a connection between darkness and crime, lighting and security. It doesn’t help that a handful of studies directly or indirectly sponsored by the lighting industry or utility companies persist in claiming that