Save Costs, Save Lives
POLICE CHIEF MAGAZINE
How Existing Infrastructure Can Become an Asset to Public Safety
FULL ARTICLE:
Every city has a network of streetlights that blanket the urban landscape. With the right equipment, they can be a powerful asset to public safety, helping to address short-staffed police forces, instead of just standard light fixtures.
Police forces are stretched thin—70 percent of law enforcement agencies report that recruitment has become more challenging over the last five years.1 Fewer officers on the street means tough decisions about where to direct resources.
At the same time, myriad technologies are emerging with a promise to make communities safer and agencies more efficient. But these solutions can be costly and complex to deploy, putting them out of reach for many cities.
The Untapped Potential Above the Streets
Streetlight poles have three critical advantages: they offer a reliable source of electricity; they sit at a perfect height for cameras, sensors, and connectivity; and they’re ubiquitous. Streetlights are everywhere, from residential streets to college campuses to bustling traffic corridors.
By leveraging these existing assets, agencies can bypass the need for constructing new poles, trenching power, or pouring concrete, saving millions in upfront costs and months in deployment time.
Streetlights as an Asset to Public Safety
Streetlights are fundamental to safety. A 2025 University of Pennsylvania article on Philadelphia’s citywide LED upgrade found a 15 percent decline in outdoor nighttime street crimes and a 21 percent reduction in nighttime gun violence.2 A smart lighting controller enables real-time monitoring and control to ensure lights are working properly, with the right level and color temperature to optimize visibility.
Connected streetlights can also help to detect hazards like downed poles or arcing lines. With real-time alerts that can be directed to the appropriate response teams, communities can maintain more resilient lighting infrastructure in the face of storms and other disasters.
Can also be paired with Public safety technology like license plate recognition (LPR) or situational awareness cameras. Deploying camera technology where it’s needed most—school zones, transit corridors, high-crime areas— can dramatically shift the equation. Police departments can direct officers to the areas in need of immediate support while cameras keep watch elsewhere for hazardous events, vehicles of interest, or perpetrators on the move.
And you don’t need a multimillion-dollar capital plan to do it. For instance, UbiCell and UbiHub can both be installed in as fast as 15 seconds per pole with no power trenching, no new pole construction, and no permits required in most cases.
Public Safety Is Within Reach
While some safety infrastructure projects cost millions of dollars and years to complete, streetlights offer a fast track to public safety success. In a world that has become mired in complexity and hurdles to safety—easy wins are good.
Streetlights are already in place. They already have power. And when smart, connected technology is added to these assets, they become more than lights—they become a foundation for a safer, smarter city.
Imagine reducing crime and improving clearance rates without installing new poles, digging trenches, or navigating months of permitting. Imagine being able to deploy situational awareness cameras or license plate recognition across a city in days instead of years. Leveraging existing infrastructure and advances in technology make these goals achievable even for agencies with limited budgets and small workforces.
It’s not just about convenience. It’s about equity and efficiency. Smaller cities and towns that can’t afford massive capital projects now have a way to deliver big-city safety tools at a fraction of the cost. That means more communities can benefit, more quickly.
The opportunity is right above our heads. By leveraging what’s already there, agencies can maximize limited budgets, extend the reach of their officers, and respond faster to what matters most: saving lives.
The path forward is about doing more and getting smarter with the infrastructure the community already has.
About Ubicquia
Ubicquia AI-driven platforms make existing critical infrastructure intelligent to increase grid resiliency, reduce energy consumption, and enhance operational efficiencies for utilities and municipalities. The company’s advanced analytics platform leverages more than 2 billion data sets per day to deliver its customers actionable insights. Ubicquia’s products and solutions, which include sensors, software, and connectivity, are compatible with over 450 million streetlights, 500 million transformers, and 1 billion utility poles worldwide. Ubicquia’s platforms are deployed in more than 800 utilities and municipalities, and its technologies are integrated on an OEM basis with leading manufacturers of transformers, streetlights, and public safety video solutions. For more information, visit www.ubicquia.com.
NOTES:
1IACP, The State of Recruitment & Retention: A Continuing Crisis for Policing (2024).
2John MacDonald et al., “Can Enhanced Street Lighting Improve Public Safety at Scale?” (SSRN, 2025).
Read the Original Article here.
