A Cheap Fix for Urban Crime - The Atlantic

In the summer of 2014, the new mayor of New York City had a problem. Bill de Blasio had campaigned against aggressive policing, particularly the city’s controversial policy of briefly detaining people and patting them down for weapons. Stop-and-frisk, which a federal court had ruled was discriminatory as practiced, had been touted as a form of crime prevention. Some New Yorkers feared that the progressive mayor, by dismissing the tactics of local police, would invite a rise in violence and disorder in the city. As if on cue, the warm months brought a surge in shootings in the city’s public-housing developments.

As the mayor’s criminal-justice adviser, I met with de Blasio and the police commissioner in the mayor’s corner office in city hall every week. We needed a plan to address the spate of shootings that didn’t rely on brute force. We also wanted a strategy for discouraging problems such as vandalism, dirty streets, and conspicuous drug use—low-level disorder that, if left unchecked, can create the conditions for more serious crime. And we wanted all of this without clogging the courts and jails.

What about better lighting in the dark areas where crime tended to concentrate? This idea had a certain appeal. The city’s Depression-era Mayor Fiorello La Guardia once insisted that “there is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage.” Good street lighting also doesn’t take sides.

That summer, de Blasio launched a $210 million initiative that delivered brighter exterior lighting and more than 150 temporary light towers across 15 high-crime public-housing developments. This was part of an effort to tamp down violence through a range of civic services that included keeping community centers open late for the first time in 30 years. The police continued to play an important role, but instead of making broadscale arrests for low-level crimes, they started an approach that they later dubbed “precision policing,” which involved targeting the few people who were driving violence instead of their scores of hangers-on. Officers were also encouraged to attend community meetings to help address local concerns about safety.

Henry Grabar: The great crime decline is happening all across the country<br>The city studied the effect of the lights on crime and neighborhood life. Aaron Chalfin, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, ran a randomized controlled trial across 80 of the city’s 335 housing developments, half of which were outfitted with temporary lighting towers. He found that serious nighttime outdoor crime dropped by 35 percent without a rise in arrests. The crime didn’t move elsewhere; it simply disappeared. A follow-up three years later found that this drop in crime had persisted.

In the field of crime and justice, most policy making relies on the science of “everyone knows”: Everyone knows that kids with nothing to do get in trouble. Everyone knows that you get knifed in a dark alley. Sometimes this common sense aligns with reality. Sometimes it doesn’t. Over the past 15 years, researchers have made a big push to test these hunches in a systematic way, and the data on lighting proved significant. Darkness is indeed a good cover for crime, so better lighting can make streets safer, not just by deterring misdeeds but also by encouraging others to fill the streets with activity.

The lights that de Blasio began rolling out more than a decade ago weren’t ideal, to be sure. The temporary lamps—which have since been upgraded—were noisy and smelly because they ran on gas generators; their intensity evoked the no-man’s-land of the Berlin Wall rather than the warm glow of brownstone living rooms. But their effectiveness was plain. Within a few years, Chalfin studied a plan in Philadelphia to upgrade about 34,000 streetlights citywide with brighter LED bulbs, which he found correlated with a 15 percent drop in outdoor nighttime street crimes and a 21 percent drop in outdoor nighttime gun violence. Local residents told interviewers that the lights made them feel more comfortable inhabiting public spaces because their neighborhoods felt safer.

These lighting studies are all in keeping with one of the most consequential and least discussed social-policy findings of the past quarter century: Urban design helps shape behavior. A growing body of research has found that the greening of vacant lots in Philadelphia was associated with a reduction in gun violence by 29 percent and overall crime by 9 percent, and the fixing of derelict buildings there coincided with a drop in gun violence by 39 percent. A six-city study that included Baltimore and Washington, D.C., found that the planting of trees was associated with a fall in gun violence by 9 percent. The redesigning of public places aligned with a drop in robberies by anywhere from 30 percent to 84 percent, depending on the study, not because these places were put under lock and key, but because...