ABSTRACT
The criminal event approach to crime (Sacco and Kennedy, 1998; Ekblom, 1994) represents a significant conceptual advance in our abil ity both to understand crime and to plan effective crime reduction programs. It presents an alternative to a traditional criminology that has focused, historically, on understanding and controlling the motiva tions and behaviors of criminal offenders to the exclusion of nearly all other considerations (See, e.g., Jeffery, 1972; Mannheim, 1972). Crime prevention and control models derived from traditional criminology have, as a consequence, also focused historically on the characteristics and actions of offenders. The criminal event model focuses instead on crimes as discrete events and examines all of their components. This has opened criminology to examination of the criminogenic roles played by victims and targets (e.g., Fattah, 1991), by guardians and managers (Felson, 1994; Eck, 1994 ), by onlookers and third persons, by places (Bottoms and Wiles, 1994; Eck and Weisburd, 1995; Brantingham and Brantingham, 1995a) and situations (Clarke, 1980), by the routines of social life ( Felson, 1994; Kennedy and Forde, 1990), and by the broader structural backcloth (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1993;
Bottoms, 1994). All of these have become objects of criminological study, supplementing and resonating with the more traditional studies of offenders to produce a much richer understanding of crime (see, e.g., Felson, 1986; Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990; Brantingham and Brantingham, 1993). In this brief article we review an extended ver sion of the criminal event model proposed by Sacco and Kennedy (1998) and suggest its implications for strategic and tactical crime prevention.
