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Comment by Forge36 | Hacker News Reader

The "feels safer" is an interesting argument. From what studies I could find the more light has the opposite impact on safety. IE: The more light at night the less safe you actually are/more crimes occur.

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Motion sensing lights outside my house certainly did nothing to improve safety for me, for the barest extra convenience of not having to remember to turn the porch light on before leaving when expecting to come back after dark.

They were likely detrimental, especially when considering the extra paranoia when I'm sitting there stoned trying to watch a movie and the light keeps ticking on outside. I got fed up with it and unscrewed the bulbs enough to not turn on, and so far my landlord hasn't complained about me doing so.

We experimented with cutting streetlight power at night where I live.

After six months of higher crime rates, we switched them back on.

So I suspect its a variable thing, based on location and existence of other lighting.

The owner of my building has installed flood lights that are on all night and effectively remove any darkness from the outside. The main reason given was for safety, despite there never being a safety issue, and trying to convince them that the opposite is true has been difficult, to say the least.

this is typical of a lot of urban property in the USA. Yet as a child I remember many kinds of bugs, crawling and flying. Now there are literally none when I look for them, on several occasions. Bird population is low, too.

Crickets. I miss the sound of crickets.

It could be that they experienced a lawsuit where not having sufficient lighting or having unlit areas where people can be expected to walk resulted in an injury, and they or the insurance company had to cough up some money.

When those kinds of lawsuits happen, everyone goes into cover your ass mode.

It's not law suit related because it's a really small building and we would know if another tenant had an issue of that scale. It could be insurance related, but I doubt it. The unfortunate reality is he's just an awful person. There are very easy and cheap ways to make it so the lights don't shine directly into people's windows he just doesn't care (we've asked).

Criminals like to be able to see what they are doing as much as anyone else.

Genuinely curious to see the source of this statement. I was always under the impression that more light is safer.

Here are some studies: https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/lighting-crime-and-s...

This list comes from an organization with an agenda of course, and there have been other studies that reached different conclusions.

Could you link them? That's an interesting conclusion. Is there any correlation drawn, or even speculation as to the cause for this? Perhaps criminals need some light as flashlights draw too much attention?

Not without bias, but this article makes a good argument and provides plenty of links to other sources:

https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/lighting-crime-and-s...

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