A lot of people think the only way to be safe is to have multiple exterior lights on their property. It's a waste of energy and a blight.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9x2dz/iama_retired_ca...
"A dog. Well-lit exterior. Nosy neighbors. A car always parked in the driveway. Lights on in the house. Anything that would normally lead someone to believe that there is someone home."
It should also be noted that outdoor security lighting is a different beast from general purpose or decorative lighting. Most homes have very patchy exterior lighting, with either plenty of glare or plenty of shadows. If it is known the house isn't occupied, poor lighting will do little to prevent someone from crawling in a basement window then walking out the front door.
They are fine as long as they are pointed down and not up or sideways (which creates glare):
* https://www.zgsm-china.com/blog/light-distribution-of-outdoo...
In 1 week my catalytic converter was stolen. A week later the light was fixed (big job, corrosion spread in the wires).
Never had an issue before nor since. Lights matter a lot.
[0] And hopefully they don't require an internet connection and send all video to a central location.
Someone came to my house after dark. I'm pretty sure they were lost. I watched the replay on my cameras and I can confirm that the light clicking on made them jump (not that it would make everyone jump, but still).
But also all lights are not equal. All lights are not equal for safety and all lights are not equal for light pollution.
Light pollution could be vastly reduced without diminishing needed lighting if the light temperature is warmer and if proper fixtures ensure the light is directed only where needed instead of half of it going directly at my bedroom window like my last couple apartments have done, among other undesired locations.
Wild animals large enough to trigger them are way too common.
Dark sky-certified lights are suggested but not required. With all that I’m still in a Bortle 5 zone, according to that map :(
How is that working so far?
Mass incarceration doesn’t seem to be working well so far. Maybe it would be time to stop treating the symptoms and try a different approach?
Property crimes are definitely under-policed.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
For state prisons, where the majority of criminals are incarcerated, 62% of prisoners are there for violent crimes.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/prisoners-2021-stat...
Of course not, the lack of policing isn't because police abruptly became lazy, it's because of intense public pressure on cities to reduce the amount of policing. Since 2014, municipalities have been desperately trying to avoid becoming the next Ferguson by pressuring their officers to minimize discretionary policing (and the incumbent potential for "bad optics"). Many municipalities have passed laws which restrict police (e.g., "no pursuit" laws), some have made the job so unpleasant that their police departments have massive attrition (e.g., Chicago), and some others have passed formal policies to reduce the amount of police/policing (e.g., Minneapolis). Some cities elected soft-on-crime prosecutors who release or minimally-sentence anyone the police apprehend, further eroding the incentive of officers to make arrests.
It's not like police need to be punished for not policing, we just need to take away the negative incentives for policing. Of course, police accountability remains an issue, but the answer isn't a naive, blanket reduction in policing (instead, repeal qualified immunity, weaken police unions, raise the bar for qualification, mandate mental health evals, etc).
If you look at the US compared to itself over time, increased policing and encarceration (such as during the 90's) does in fact lead to lower crime. The relative absence of policing and prosecution since 2020 have resulted in a sharp increase in crime.
I'm certainly open to the idea that sentences should be shorter, but I think that would need to come with a corresponding increase in the number of police - and in their willingness to enforce laws. This would be under the theory that increasing the odds that you will be punished is more of a deterrent than increasing the severity of the punishment.
This has been going on since ~2014, and you're absolutely spot-on that it absolutely correlates with reductions in the amount of policing. Roland Fryer (famed Harvard economist) and Tanaya Devi wrote a paper about this a couple years ago (but many other papers have similar findings): https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...
Further, virtually no one in American politics is arguing that incarceration is sufficient, but rather the debate is about whether or not it is necessary or if we can (for example) replace police with social workers and call it a day.
No, they're not incarcerating the right people.
They're incarcerating some financial idiots like SBF and Holmes and some weed users who don't threaten my physical safety at all and I frankly don't give a damn about, while the people running around punching Asian grandmothers in SF and smashing local Asian businesses are running free.
SBF didn't cause me to lose money. He isn't even remotely on my radar. You know who did? The fucker who broke into my car last year and stole $5000 worth of stuff. What's that guy doing? Roaming the streets breaking and smashing more cars, probably, considering the police dropped the case.
Imagine how much better US cities would be if the white collars that pushed oxicontin and fentanyls by corrupting doctors, officials and insurance companies had been more scared of consequences. But no, most of them still roam free.
That is some peak HN right there. Prisons are too full of bankers, amirite?
Also, people generally do crime because of lack of opportunity or options, which is why many countries treat the criminal justice system as an opportunity to rehabilitate people.
We have one of the most punitive criminal justice systems in the world and the highest incarceration rate of any country. Imagine if we were able to spend all that money on helping to lift struggling people, instead of punishing them.
They'd be productive, contributing members of society, instead of a huge drain on society. Keeping people in prison is very expensive.
I agree with rehabilitation, but I personally would like to be alive tomorrow, which is why I do not choose to live in Oakland.
> Imagine if we were able to spend all that money on helping to lift struggling people, instead of punishing them.
These two can happen at the same time. It's less about punishment, and more about making everyone else feel safe. If they want to create a "city of crooks" in the middle of Nevada that isn't a punishment but a rehabilitation center I'm all up for that.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-h...
If the US rids itself of petty drug convictions the incarceration rate wouldn't be so high.
This is a generic argument against progress. Imagine if we shrugged off vaccines because "the pathogen-derived death rate is trending down over the last 200 years" or if we rebutted #metoo with "a friendly reminder that women's rights are trending up over the last 100 years". Just because something was worse 50 years ago doesn't mean we should content ourselves with a worsening trend now.
> Also, people generally do crime because of lack of opportunity or options, which is why many countries treat the criminal justice system as an opportunity to rehabilitate people.
If the premise were true, crime should have gone down in the face of the red-hot labor market we had been experiencing over the last few years. Even still, if you can find a way to reliably rehabilitate violent offenders, I doubt you'd face any serious objection. In the meanwhile though, the soft-on-crime approach to violent crime (both with respect to reducing the amount of discretionary policing and catch-and-release approach to prosecution) appears to be (predictably) devastating communities and (predictably) further perpetuating the cycle of violent crime.
The rising-tide "red-hot labor market" didn't lift all boats, the pandemic severely impacted service industry workers, inflation / cost of living impacts low income people far more than anyone else, wealth consolidated at an extremely accelerated pace during the pandemic...
> Even still, if you can find a way to reliably rehabilitate violent offenders, I doubt you'd face any serious objection.
Which part of "the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world" did you not understand?
The nordic countries are particularly successful at this.
Turns out that universal healthcare (including proper mental health services), social safety support systems, and a detention systems working to help people before putting them back into society, work better than just shoving people into a concrete cube and tossing them out on the street into a society heavily stacked against them with a parole officer breathing down their neck. Gee, I wonder why they return to crime here?
Suggesting that "the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world" implies that some significant number of Americans would reject rehabilitation demonstrates a complete and obvious failure to reason, and personally I find it weird that you would broadcast that publicly but carry on...
> Turns out that universal healthcare (including proper mental health services), social safety support systems, and a detention systems working to help people before putting them back into society, work better than just shoving people into a concrete cube and tossing them out on the street into a society heavily stacked against them with a parole officer breathing down their neck. Gee, I wonder why they return to crime here?
Right, and like most Americans, I agree with those things, the difference is that I don't believe we should throw our most vulnerable communities to the wolves by sharply reducing policing without first establishing those other crime-deterring alternatives. I don't think it's sufficient to say "we'll definitely address the root causes one day in the future, so it's totally fine to reduce policing now". And indeed, that's what was demanded: BLM was an anti-policing movement first and foremost and "defund the police" and "abolish the police" were not euphemisms for "establish a stronger social safety net before reducing policing".
When a property, building, etc is dark - someone up to no good has to use light to see what they're doing, and that stands out much, much more.
You probably wouldn't notice someone at the front door of a business as you drove by at night if it's well lit, but if it were unlit , you'd probably immediately notice a flashlight.
There's a reason behind the "must be a full moon" saying. People up to no good back before outdoor lighting was a thing would use moonlight to be able to see what they were doing.
Erm, no. If you trained a bit, and it is not pitch black (which it never is, in the cities) you can move and act very well without light. Also there is nightvision, which got quite cheap.
What works well and is a good compromise to protect from thieves and co. is light activated by motion detectors.
The above comments’ point is literally that places are overly lit due to surrounding always on lights. The aforementioned properties and buildings with excessive lights are part of what make cities so bright.