Routine Activity Theory

Opportunity makes the theft
a. Routine Activity Approach The focus of routine activity theory is to study crime as an event, highlighting its relation to space and time and emphasizing its ecological nature and the implications thereof (Cohen&felson,1979). Routine activity theory explains the criminal event through three essential elements that converge in space and time in the course of daily activities, first, a potential offender with the capacity to commit a crime, second, a suitable target or victim and finally the absence of guardians capable of protecting targets and victims. According to Cohen and Felson (1979), anyone had the potential to commit an offense and has the capacity to do such act. This could be likely young man, those unemployed and those people who have nothing to do in their lives. Later on Cohen & Felson used the term “motivated offender “because they believe that an individual can commit an offense due to the presence of physical factors. The most suitable target or victim is a person or property. Felson preferred to use the term target than victim, the fact that mostly crimes aims in taking goods. Cohen & Felson describes the point of view of the offender in value, inertia, visibility and access. Value, referring to the from the perspective of the offender, inertia referring to size, weight, and shape, or the physical aspects of the person or good that act as obstacles or impediments to the offender seeing it as suitable, visibility exposure of