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      Absence of street lighting may prevent vehicle crime, but spatial and temporal displacement remains a concern

      Tompson, Lisa; Steinbach, Rebecca; Johnson, Shane D.; Teh, Chun Siong; Perkins, Chloe; Edwards, Phil; Armstrong, Benedict
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      a4336b4b-fec2-4014-9d11-3a358a212cfd.pdf
      Published version, 1.190Mb
      DOI
       10.1007/s10940-022-09539-8
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      Permanent link to Research Commons version
      https://hdl.handle.net/10289/14804
      Abstract
      Objectives

      This paper estimates the effect of changes in street lighting at night on levels of crime at street-level. Analyses investigate spatial and temporal displacement of crime into adjacent streets.

      Methods

      Offense data (burglaries, robberies, theft of and theft from vehicles, and violent crime) were obtained from Thames Valley Police, UK. Street lighting data (switching lights off at midnight, dimming, and white light) were obtained from local authorities. Monthly counts of crime at street-level were analyzed using a conditional fixed-effects Poisson regression model, adjusting for seasonal and temporal variation. Two sets of models analyzed: (1) changes in night-time crimes adjusting for changes in day-time crimes and (2) changes in crimes at all times of the day.

      Results

      Switching lights off at midnight was strongly associated with a reduction in night-time theft from vehicles relative to daytime (rate ratio RR 0.56; 0.41–0.78). Adjusted for changes in daytime, night-time theft from vehicles increased (RR 1.55; 1.14–2.11) in adjacent roads where street lighting remained unchanged.

      Conclusion

      Theft from vehicle offenses reduced in streets where street lighting was switched off at midnight but may have been displaced to better-lit adjacent streets. Relative to daytime, night-time theft from vehicle offenses reduced in streets with dimming while theft from vehicles at all times of the day increased, thus suggesting temporal displacement. These findings suggest that the absence of street lighting may prevent theft from vehicles, but there is a danger of offenses being temporally or spatially displaced.
      Type
      Journal Article
      Publisher
      Springer Science and Business Media LLC
      Rights
      Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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