As the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department investigates the city's fourth reported rape in the last month and a half, officers continue to urge women to avoid walking in dark areas.
Just 24 hours after we shared that alert with you last Friday, we found several street lights that were not working.
The Charlotte City Council recently set a goal with hopes of keeping more lights lit at night.
To increase public safety, leaders want more than 95 percent of street lights working at all times, according to the city's recently approved budget.
The city reports its 311-service received more than 3,700 street light repair requests from July 2017 through June 2018.
Those requests are on top of any calls customers made directly to Duke Energy. The repair numbers suggest roughly 95 percent of the city's street lights were working over a 12-month period.
For the second year in a row, leaders want to improve that number and get even closer to 100 percent.
"One-hundred percent is probably impossible, but it's somewhat of our goal. We want to have all our lights on, all the time," Duke Energy spokesperson Tim Pettit said. "The one thing that we're very dependent on is our customer base to phone in that outage."
Duke Energy maintains the city's roughly 75,000 street lights. Some of the issues are beyond the utility's control, like lights snuffed out by crashes, falling trees and vandalism.
Other outages are the result of older, burned out bulbs. Duke Energy encourages people to report street light problems using its website.
In the meantime, the city's working with the utility to update all of its light bulbs to ones that last longer.
"Duke Energy is working with the City of Charlotte to update to LED bulbs in existing street lights throughout the city," Charlotte Department of Transportation spokesperson Amy Mitchell said. "This process is being completed collaboratively. All new street lights installed by Duke Energy are LED lights."
We reported the burned out lights we found to Duke Energy Tuesday. Pettit said the goal is to make repairs within five days.