Effects of improved street lighting on crime

Improved street lighting serves many functions and is used in both public and private settings. The prevention of personal and property crime is one of its objectives in public space, which is the main focus of this review. There are two main theories of why improved street lighting may cause a reduction in crime. The first suggests that improved lighting leads to increased surveillance of potential offenders (both by improving visibility and by increasing the number of people on the street) and hence to increased deterrence of potential offenders. The second suggests that improved lighting signals community investment in the area and that the area is improving, leading to increased community pride, community cohesiveness, and informal social control. The first theory predicts decreases in crime especially during the hours of darkness, while the second theory predicts decreases in crime during both daytime and nighttime. Results of this review indicate that improved street lighting significantly reduces crime. This lends support for the continued use of improved street lighting to prevent crime in public space. The review also found that nighttime crimes did not decrease more than daytime crimes. This suggests that a theory of street lighting focusing on its role in increasing community pride and informal social control may be more plausible than a theory focusing on increased surveillance and increased deterrence. Future research should be designed to test the main theories of the effects of improved street lighting more explicitly, and future lighting schemes should employ high quality evaluation designs with long-term followups

Trends and Issues in Corporate Security Practice and Regulation in Australia

There is no longer any doubt that good in-house security is of great value to every corporation in Australian business life. The growing importance of security preparedness has been influenced by at least four factors. The first is that there continues to be a worldwide trend away from reliance on public police in the face of threat. Instead, corporations are more likely to look to ‘self-protection’ (van Steden and Sarre, 2007; Sarre and Prenzler, 2009) or what has been referred to by Dutch criminologist Jan van Dijk (2008: 140) as ‘responsive securitization.’ The second is the increased security standards required by the law for insurance purposes. Moreover it is axiomatic that poor security increases a corporation’s legal liability and exposes it to other vulnerabilities such as the public opprobrium that attaches to the death of, or injury to, a worker (Sarre, 2008). Thirdly, there are now rigorous workplace safety legislative demands on all corporations that, if not adhered to, may lead to prosecutions. Fourthly, there have been improvements in the scope and reach of what is referred to as the ‘science of security’ and the hardware and software that are its crucial components. Finally, these security technologies are nowadays affordable, as are the wages of the officers who deploy and monitor them (Borodzicz and Gibson, 2006; Giever, 2007).No Full Tex