ABSTRACT
The considerable revival of interest in the rational actor model of crime and criminal behaviour has been clearly demonstrated by the considerable government enthusiasm for situational crime prevention measures which were energetically promoted as governments essentially lost patience with the failure of criminologists to solve the apparently never-ending explosion in the crime figures. Certainly, spending in the UK since the late 1970s was to become devoted more to finding and evaluating pragmatic solutions to particular offences rather than to developing criminological theory. At the same time most professional crime prevention practitioners that were to enjoy government patronage came to accept the central nostrum that crime is an outcome of the opportunity to offend. Regardless of offender motivation, removal of that opportunity, it is argued, will reduce the incidence of crime. Consequently whole ranges of measures were to be introduced in order to remove or reduce the opportunity to offend.
