“Rick Perry’s Strange Sex Story” was the New York Times headline. The columnist, Gail Collins, said Perry further proved he was “an absolutely terrible secretary of energy” by arguing “that fossil fuels would protect women from sexual assault.”
Perry, a conservative Republican from Texas, was an official in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet during his first term. This meant that every news outlet was obligated to run the exact same mocking story. And they all did. It accomplished the desired result: misleading the readers and making him look like a fool.
To be fair, Perry was not the clearest orator in American politics. He said when streetlights are powered by reliable electricity, “when the lights are on,” sexual assault is rarer.
It’s undeniable that natural gas-fired power plants are less intermittent than wind or solar. So, if you want the streetlights to be on all night, every night, you certainly don’t want to be dependent on renewable energy.
The second premise of Perry’s argument was that more reliable streetlights would prevent crime, including sexual assault. That’s long been a point of dispute, but a new study seems to justify Perry’s stance belatedly.
Better streetlights mean less crime, according to a group of criminologists from the University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia upgraded its streetlights beginning in August 2023, and the scholars reported “a 15% decline in outdoor nighttime street crimes and a 21% reduction in outdoor nighttime gun violence following the streetlight upgrades.”
The scholars calculated that lighting upgrades were responsible for about one-fourth of that reduction. Violent crime was falling throughout this period across the city as the crime wave caused by the COVID-19 lockdowns and the post-George Floyd protests subsided. But crime fell faster than expected in the blocks where Philadelphia replaced the old yellowish high-pressure sodium bulbs with new brighter, whiter LED lights.
Importantly, the newly lit blocks didn’t see an extra reduction in indoor crime, only outdoor crime, which suggested the lights really did make a difference. Also, these blocks saw a reduction in daytime crimes (smaller than the night-time reduction), which suggested the lights generally made a neighborhood less attractive to criminals.
AN ORAL HISTORY OF CRIMEFIGHTING THAT WORKS
Something even more important might be happening here: brighter, less scary streets may have brought residents out of their homes more, increased neighborly interactions, and thus made the neighborhood safer and better connected.
It turns out that good city lights can do a lot of good.
