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Lighting areas with buffer zones
Source publication
This research uses both situational approaches to crime and informal social controls lenses to assess the effect of improved lighting in two micro-places. A pre/post-comparison design incorporating the 12 months prior to lighting installation and the 12 months after, coupled with a buffer zone, was utilized to assess the direct effect on crimes and...
Citations
... Going back to theoretical reasons, while on average it appears expanding street lights reduces crimes (Welsh et al., 2022), converting those lights to LED does not have as rigorous an empirical baseline. Improving CrimRxiv Analysis of LED street light conversions on rearm crimes in Dallas, Texas 12 illumination in an area that already has it may not be as overall effective (Bonner & Stacey, 2021). But, one of the findings from those prior analyses suggests that improved lighting not only decreases crime at night, but also during the daytime (Welsh & Farrington, 2008;Xu et al., 2018). ...
... Ratcliffe conducted a case study of violent crime around 1282 bars in Philadelphia and revealed that violence was highly clustered within 25.9 m (85 feet) of bars, then decreased rapidly [35]. Second, in the environmental design theory proposed by Newman, urban spatial environmental factors are closely related to urban crime [36,37]. Various criminology theories and empirical studies have linked the urban environment to crime; in particular, copious studies demonstrate that most criminal cases are related to social environments, physical environments, or composite (i.e., the combination of the above two) edges; edges attract more crimes because they may be sites of increases in potential conflict and decreases in spatial ownership [38]. ...
... We divide the total raster light intensity in the area by the resident population (in 10,000 units); δ i is the city fixed effect, τ t is the time fixed effect, and ε it is the random error term. To reduce the estimation bias caused by omitted variables, we added a series of control variables (X it ), which may affect the crime rate [37]. The first set is demographic characteristics, including sex ratio (sexratio), education level (edu), and population density (upd). ...
With Chinese people’s increasing willingness to participate in night activities, local governments have begun regarding the nighttime economy as an important means to stimulate urban vitality and increase social employment. This study uses changes in urban nighttime light brightness as a measure of environmental factors to examine the social effects of nighttime activities. Based on panel data for 227 prefecture-level cities in China from 2000 to 2013, this study empirically investigates the effect and mechanism of nighttime light brightness on the urban crime rate. Empirical results show that (1) a 1% increase in nighttime light brightness increases criminal arrest rate and prosecution rate by 1.474% and 2.371%, respectively; (2) the effects are larger in developed areas with higher levels of lighting and economic development, or in urban areas (compared with rural areas), and (3) the mechanism test shows that such effects are more pronounced in cities with more nighttime business, confirming the existence of a crime opportunity effect.
