The concept of defensible space is controversial. A United States Department of Justice experiment in Hartford, Connecticut closed streets and assigned police teams to certain neighborhoods. New public housing projects were designed around ideas of limited access to the city, but Hartford did not show any dramatic drop in crime. Yet, the private places of St. Louis do have much lower crime than public streets. The reason appears to be that in St. Louis, people had the capacity and incentives to defend their defensible spaces. Residents had the right to ask an unwelcome individual (i.e. not a resident or guest) to leave their street, because they jointly owned it. On public streets, one cannot legally act against someone until they have committed a crime.