Every place has some form of security lights or the other. Whether it be your home, office, parking lot, or just an open space, lights are used as deterrents to deter intrusions as well as to identify any such attempts. They are also used to light up dark places so that anti-social activity can be minimized.
This is not a new phenomenon and although gas and electric lights have only been for around a hundred years, having street lights to light up the street and provide security has been around for much longer. Even now a campfire is not extinguished but is left to burn even after everyone has gone into their tents if there is no danger of fire spreading because it keeps away wild animals. Who knows security lights may have started when man was living in caves and first started to use fire for his use.
The only problem is that crooks have evolved nowadays so that they mostly do not burglarize homes in the night when the whole place is well lit. They instead do so during the day when there is just too much activity going on around for people to notice what is happening. Another problem is that after the advent of high discharge lamps, they have become favored as security lights because not only are they very bright, they are also very energy efficient. Power bills become a major problem if you are going to leave a number of lights on the whole night long. High discharge lamps are so bright that it causes glare when anyone looks there and criminals tend to take advantage of this. In fact in a town called Overtornea Sweden townspeople started turning off all lights in order to conserve power and found that crime rates dropped by 50%. This is not a one off case and in another test carried out in West Sussex, UK, all night lighting was found to have actually increased the incidence of crime in that area by 55% although the people felt that they were safer.
This seems to imply that security lights are not very effective at providing security and is more to lull you into a false sense of security than anything else. These lights are effective only if there is someone watching the area that is lit, either directly or through CCTV. This does not mean that security lights have outlived their usefulness however and if crooks have evolved, so have lights.
There are a number of security lights that are activated by motion or are tripped by breaking an invisible laser light that are actually very effective, maybe not as deterrents but at least to foil intrusions. In fact these days you also get solar powered LED lights that are actuated by motion sensors and cost only around $90 or so. These lights are actually a good deal because they are cheap, easy to install, and are very effective too. Obviously some amount of precautions have to be taken to ensure that these lights are not damaged or removed in order to aid a future burglary, but that will have to be done for any kind of light, not just the solar powered ones.
The normal security lights are spotlights or halogen lights mounted high up on houses and although very effective as outdoor lighting systems, they are not necessarily good for security as mentioned above. It is better therefore to look at newer technology if you do not want to take the risk of leaving your home unlit. It might be very nice to read statistics on paper, but following this is a whole different ball game.
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