525 street lights during the first five months of 2021

Jamaica is struggling with the rapid theft of street lights, which is costing the country millions of dollar each year to replace and secure.

In addition, the regular theft of the street lamps is hampering the government efforts to illuminate crime-ridden areas. Thieves have made off with 525 street lights during the first five months of 2020.

Jamaica’s light and power company, the Jamaica Public Service (JPS), has reported that street light theft was most common in Montego Bay, St James and Portmore, St Catherine, which police statistics identified as some of Jamaica’s crime hotspots. JPS has reported that these thefts are harming its investments in public lighting.

In 2019 JPS began installing expensive and new energy-saving LED lights, which have the capability to show when they were last operational. The LED lights were quickly stolen in the northern towns of Moneague and Claremont in St Ann.

Thieves have become smarter at stealing street lights

These LED lights are fitted with a tracker but thieves have got smarter at fleecing them without triggering the tracker.

“Thieves have got wind of it and have figured out [how] to steal the fixture without the tracker being affected,” a JPS manager reportedly told officials at a St Ann government meeting.

While neither government nor JPS officials have offered an explanation for the thefts of these trigger-sensitive street lights, some have speculated that criminals are seeking to destroy the street lights, which have been shown to reduce violence in other countries.

InSight Crime, a non-profit think-tank and media organisation, pointed to a 2017 study in Brazil that found that expanding streetlighting in the northeastern part of the country, a hotspot for violence, dramatically reduced homicides. Even a slight increase in illumination can reduce street crime, according to a long-range study in the Chilean capital of Santiago.

Case made out that street lights deter crime

The study showed that crime dropped by 20 per cent with just one more hour of light. Local Government Minister Desmond McKenzie spoke out against the theft of streetlights during his Sectoral Debate presentation on Tuesday.

In 2017, McKenzie first posited that criminals were behind the destruction of street lights, urging residents of Westmoreland, in western Jamaica, to protect the street lights from those wanting to create a cover of darkness to carry out illegal activities. In 2019, the local government minister called for strong action in dealing with streetlight theft.