Crime in the Dark: The Role of Electricity Rationing in Shaping Urban Crime Patterns

This project asks how planned electricity outages (loadshedding) affect the spatial and temporal distribution of crime in urban South Africa, and whether high‐resolution analysis can guide resource‐efficient prevention strategies. It examines how outages alter routine activities, environmental visibility, and guardianship in ways that reshape criminal opportunities. Preliminary evidence indicates that outages are associated with higher property crime, but operational questions remain about precise timing, spatial concentration, and displacement patterns. Technically, the study will link georeferenced incident‐level crime data from the South African Police Service (SAPS) to municipality‐level loadshedding schedules (2019–2025) to estimate causal effects of outages on different crime categories, explicitly accounting for spatial spillovers and temporal displacement. Station‐ and neighborhood‐level analyses will map when and where crime risk rises during outages, producing high‐resolution risk profiles that form the empirical basis for subsequent randomized evaluations of targeted patrol deployment and related interventions. The project forges a partnership with SAPS, which shares administrative data and receives station‐specific guidance on when and where crime risk rises to improve patrol allocation. The research advances crime pattern by showing how large‐scale infrastructure failures reshape , and provides an evidence base for adaptive policing during chronic electricity rationing.