Street luminosity influence on reported thefts from vehicles during night-time

Abstract

Criminality across many urban settings has created the need to develop tools that help better understand the social and physical determinants of crime. One specific aspect is how certain urban characteristics may influence criminal activities. One facet of the built environment, street lighting, influences the perception of safety for a potential victim, and it also influences a perpetrator´s risk analysis, affecting how it envisions both costs and rewards for committing a crime. The study looked into the relationship between street illuminance levels, through street light pole density as a proxy, and other crime determinants and the prevalence of reported Night-Time Theft from Vehicle crimes in Vancouver, BC, Canada, through exploratory spatial data analysis and by fitting Geographically Weighted Poisson Regressions. To test if street lighting pole density is a usable proxy for street illuminance it also modeled the relationship between street lighting pole and tree densities and measured night time street illuminance by fitting an Ordinary Least Squares regression. Night time street illuminance was measured using a specially built georeferenced mobile illuminance collection station based on the senseBox. Findings suggest that while a citywide effect is evident for some of the explanatory variables, there is an evident nonstationary relation between the explanatory variables and Night-Time Theft from Vehicle crimes in Vancouver. Regarding street lighting, regressions suggest it may not be an important covariate with Night-Time Theft from Vehicle crime. Coefficients are quite heterogenous throughout with most of the study area showing a mix of weak to mild positive association, specially on the East side, and weak to mild negative associations. The OLS regression showed a moderately weak relation between light poles and tree densities to collected street illuminance. The question of street lighting pole density being a usable proxy for street illuminance could not be answered with confidence.