Below are 10 reasons you should turn off your insecurity lights and campaign against excessive lighting. Students: ask your classmates who feels safer from crime if their homes are lit up outside at night (nearly everyone I predict). Then ask them what they think of the following, one by one:

Dark Fact 1. Most crime take place during the day, there is plenty of light then.

Dark Fact 2. Night time crime happens not because it is dark, but because most people are asleep and not around to witness criminal activity.

Dark Fact 3. At 3am when normal people are not around light benefits only one sector of humanity - those with criminal intent. Light aids criminals rather than deters them.

Committing a crime in pitch black is difficult. Having to use a torch would give away felonious activity, a criminal moving around in a lit area would go unnoticed. It seems to be totally ignored that criminals use lighting to help them and are not afraid of it at all. Why should they be when no one is using the light to observe them.

Dark Fact4. Lit areas attract undesirables and anti-social behaviour.

You do not get rabble congregating in unlit areas to cause trouble. Light provides visibility for the opportunist crime to be committed. No one sprays graffiti in total darkness, how could they? Vandals do need to see what they are desecrating. Most vandalism, graffiti and small time burglaries happen in lit areas.

Dark Fact 5. The professional criminal will not be put off by any amount of light, nor other deterents, even ones that may be far more effective.

Dark Fact 6. Relying on a placebo such as lighting discourages more reliable crime prevention methods such as better locks, alarms and proper policing. It leads to a FALSE sense of security which is not genuine and offers little if any real protection.

Dark Fact 7. Most rural areas are unlit and have very low if not zero crime rates. Start putting streetlights in these areas and crime goes up.

Dark Fact 8. If you want to keep something safe keep it hidden, do not put it under the spotlight so to speak.

Dark Fact 9. Most statistics and research has failed to come up with any evidence that lighting prevents crime.

The one exception was done by a Kate Painter who it turned out was married to the CEO of one of the UKs biggest lighting firms - so any credibility there has been lost in the vested interests involved. Very poor research has only concentrated on peoples "belief" in lighting preventing crime where the erroneous reliance on light to keep things safe has just been regurgitated without any thought as to the mechanisms of how light keeps us safe.

We are no longer in the stone age where a light may have kept dangerous beasts with far better night adaption than us, at bay. Our biggest modern dangers come from other humans who are not put off by a light but use it to their advantage.

Dark Fact 10. Brighter is most certainly NOT better. Having an insecurity light of blinding magnitude pointing straight at you destroys visibility. It is very difficult to see anything other than the bright light.

There is much that could be added like crime plummeting during Auckland's blackout a few years back and a US Dark Campuses campaign to reduce crime on university campuses. There is a case for well directed lighting we can use but none for the massive waste of current lighting practices.

Noel

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