Erika D. Smith: Streetlights must be part of crime-fighting plan
It was freezing the night I spent walking the crime-riddled streets of Indy’s Near Northside with the Ten Point Coalition.
It was early in the evening. The sun had just gone down. But on our way to our first stop, a Marathon station known more for drug deals and fights than selling gas, the street we were on was dark. So dark that I was afraid I might trip over a curb because I could barely see the ground, much less 10 feet in front of me. So dark that I couldn’t make out the shadows on the porches and front yards of boarded-up homes. Is that a person? An old lawn chair? I couldn’t be sure.
“Why’s it so dark?” I finally asked.
“We called,” one woman told me. “They told us it costs money to turn the lights on. No one has the money.”
This made no sense to me. In fact, it has never made sense to me why so much of the urban core of Indianapolis seems so dark.
But last week, buried on Page 29 of Mayor Greg Ballard’s newly announced strategic plan, I found the answer:
“Indy has been under a streetlight construction moratorium since the 1980s due to a cut in the budget appropriation. Although Indy has been efficient relocating or repurposing streetlights when possible, they have not been able to increase the total number of streetlights in Indy.”
“A funding strategy,” it continued, “is critical to install new lights.”
That last sentence is a no-brainer. I’m just glad someone said it.
We spend a lot of time talking about stopping crime. Particularly, about how we can stop teenagers and young men from robbing and shooting people, and about how we can make a dent in the drug trade, which is fueling so much of this violence.
But it is ridiculous to keep having this conversation and keep spending money without addressing the most basic of crime prevention tools: streetlights.
There’s no way we can ensure neighborhoods are safe when they’re pitch black. And to Ballard’s goal of attracting more middle-class residents, there’s no way more families will bypass the suburbs for potentially dangerous Indianapolis neighborhoods when you can’t see if a guy with a gun is lurking across the street when you go out to walk the dog.
The dark night I spent with Ten Point was on Eugene Street — one block from a church with a great after-school program and only a couple of blocks from the main thoroughfare of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street. It was on this same block, one man recounted, that he almost lost his life after two gun-wielding teens who wanted money surprised him by jumping out of a dark alley.
There are blocks like that all over the urban core of Indianapolis, even though the Department of Public Works does adjust streetlights for public safety purposes.
The moratorium on streetlights is surely a reason why things are this bad. But there are other factors, too.
Consider that Indianapolis had about 700,000 residents in 1980. The population is now closing on 850,000. It’s true that during that time a large percentage of the population has fled Center Township to the city’s surrounding townships. So one could argue that there’s less of a need for streetlights in the sparsely populated urban core than, say, on the relatively dense Northeastside. But in reality, the decades-long shift in population — and wealth — has made the need for more streetlights even greater in poorer, urban neighborhoods.
Today, for example, there are far more empty and abandoned houses in the urban core than in previous decades. The fewer occupied houses on a block, the darker it is at night.
One recourse residents have is to call Indianapolis Power & Light Co. and pay to get a streetlight-like security light installed along their property. But to do that, residents must be homeowners and have the money to pay for it — in other words, not many of the people who live in the urban core.
The Indianapolis neighborhoods where streetlights have been added over the years are newer, more organized ones outside of Center Township. They tend to be subdivisions with homeowners associations that have the know-how to request more streetlights from IPL and the money from a stable pool of residents to pay for them year after year.
If we are to make Indianapolis a safer city, reversing these trends must be a priority. Police are important. So are after-school programs for at-risk youth and job training programs for ex-offenders. But we also must take care of the basics.
And streetlights are as basic as you can get.
Contact Star columnist Erika D. Smith at (317) 444-6424, erika.smith@indystar.com, on Twitter at @erika_d_smith or at www.facebook.com/ErikaDSmith.Journalist.