Balancing personal safety from night lighting against global losses (“Is More Light Safer?” LD+A, April 2025) is a classic “Tragedy of the Commons” situation.1 If someone is asking the question, then the odds are pretty low that their perceptions of the global risks from their individual actions will outweigh their direct risk (crime) from lower lighting levels.
A possibly more persuasive argument against simply adding more lighting is to note that lighting makes it possible for everyone, including criminals, to navigate quickly and safely while evaluating the local environment. More light generally means more activity, which means more chance of accidents and more targets for crime. Adding more light changes the character of an area, and not necessarily for the better. I still recall reading about a school district that solved its graffiti and vandalism problem by turning off schoolyard lights so that it was too dark to be a hangout. Making it easier to see that a potential victim is alone, small, female, young, old, or inebriated is similarly not what you wish to accomplish.
Crime is a social problem. In urban areas where economic and social networks may be inadequate, criminal behavior may become an attractive option or even necessity for some people. In this case, more lighting may make criminal activity easier; perhaps explaining the seeming paradoxical finding that crime shifted to more lit areas in Chicago when lights went out.
Light well, and not just more.
Robert ClearMember IES
1 Garret Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, vol. 162, pp. 1243–1248, Dec. 1968.
LD+A reserves the right to edit letters for length and/or clarity.
