Brighter nights, safer communities? Assessing a city-wide street lighting intervention on crime and police activity

• In Event: Place-Based Public Investments and Crime: Evidence on Lighting, Mobility, and Community Infrastructure

Abstract

"Brighter nights, safer communities? Assessing a city-wide street lighting intervention on crime and police activity"

Given the substantial social costs of crime, there is renewed interest in enhancing public safety through neighborhood investments that do not rely solely on law enforcement. Street lighting interventions, a key way to change the built environment, have been proposed as effective crime-prevention measures by enabling better monitoring, increasing the risk of detection, and encouraging public use of shared spaces. Evidence indicates that such interventions can deter crime. However, their scalability and, more importantly, their effects on police behavior remain underexplored. Do lighting improvements complement policing by increasing enforcement, or do they reduce the need for enforcement and thus act as substitutes? This research evaluates the citywide LED street lighting retrofit in New Orleans, LA, which upgraded 42,000 lights over three years beginning in 2012. Since all areas ultimately received upgrades, the timing of installation was determined by resource allocation, procurement processes, logistics, and technical considerations. This created a natural experiment, leveraging staggered installation as a difference-in-differences framework. The primary analysis uses street segment–quarter data to capture localized effects near the lighting upgrades. A complementary hexagon-level analysis (spanning a few city blocks) assesses broader community effects. Adjacent areas are examined for spatial spillovers, and changes in daytime and nighttime public safety are analyzed to assess temporal displacement. The study measures changes in reported criminal incidents to determine whether improved lighting deters crime. It also examines impacts on 911 calls for service, distinguishing between citizen- and officer-initiated calls to separate demand for police services from proactive enforcement. Additionally, the research evaluates whether the intervention shifts the composition of calls for service and response times, and which communities are most affected by these changes to the built environment. This study advances understanding of when public infrastructure investments are a complement or substitute for law enforcement.

Authors

• David Mitre Becerril, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Alex Knorre, University of South Florida
  Non-Presenting Co-Author