ABSTRACT
As discussed above, crime is a complex event. In order for a criminal event to occur, four things must be in concurrence: a law, an offender, a target, and a place/time. Without the law, there is literally no criminal event. There may be social norms violated at times, but such violations are not considered criminal events unless a law is broken. Without an offender, the person who commits the criminal event, there is no criminal event. And without some target or victim there is no criminal event. Of course these statements are tautological, but the point is that these aspects of criminal events are necessary. These fi rst three dimensions of a criminal event have been studied quite extensively throughout the history of criminology (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1981b). The fourth dimension is spatial-temporal and this is the focus within the geometric theory of crime, particularly the spatial. It is important to note here again that those who follow the theories within environmental criminology, including the geometric theory of crime, consider the fi rst three dimensions to be important. It is just that much of pre-1970 criminology did not address the fourth dimension. One may argue that social disorganization theory did address this dimension, and it did, but from a sociological rather than a geographical imagination.
