How Paris will always be remembered for Crime Prevention.
A recent trip to Paris made me wonder about how it became to be known as ‘The City of Light’
Interestingly, it was a result of a crime prevention strategy implemented in 1667 by the then-head of the Paris Police, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie.
La Reynie’s appointment followed a period of civil unrest. Restoring law and order, and public confidence in security was a priority for King Louis XIV.
On his appointment, La Reynie implemented a strategy that had two key elements. Both of which will sound familiar to those responsible for public safety today.
A significant uplift in police numbers, and more street lighting. Citizens of Paris were even asked to place lights in their windows to lighten up the dark places in which criminals and crime thrived. Thus, Paris became know as ‘the city of light’.
This reminded me of a recent report from the University of Chicago Urban Labs which reported on the findings of a randomised control trial in New York.
This study had the city randomly allocate lighting to a number of public housing developments with high crime, leaving a similar number without additional lighting to act as a control group.
The results were significant with areas with additional lighting seeing a 36% reduction in violent and property crimes at night, and a 4% reduction overall.
However, the effect might not be the same for all types of crime. An earlier study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that turning off street lights reduced thefts from cars by 50%. The researchers speculated that lighting made valuables in cars more visible and so encouraged opportunistic crime.
As with all issues related to crime and keeping our communities safe the solutions are nuanced with no one solution providing the answer to everything.
This complexity makes the case for evidence-based policing but the actions of La Reynie over 350 years ago show the timelessness of some common-sense solutions to crime, but also how we should value instinct and professional judgment in our public safety practitioners.
Innovation often comes from instinct and with this the opportunity to test new initiatives, which in turn builds the evidence base necessary to make the case for scaling up solutions.
Keeping our communities safe is an ongoing mission. Threats to safety evolve and we must be creative in responding to these. Fostering innovation is an important capability for public safety and who knows what this will lead to. Possibly the opportunity for your city to be forever remembered for what it did to make it safer.
