Compare methods

	Crime Concentration Index	Routine Activity Theory
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1989	1979
Originator	Lawrence Sherman, Patrick Gartin & Michael Buerger; David Weisburd	Lawrence E. Cohen & Marcus Felson
Type	Descriptive concentration measure for crime across micro-places	Theoretical framework for explaining the occurrence of predatory crime
Seminal source	Sherman, L. W., Gartin, P. R., & Buerger, M. E. (1989). Hot spots of predatory crime: Routine activities and the criminology of place. Criminology, 27(1), 27–56.	Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44(4), 588–608.
Aliases	Crime Concentration at Place, Hot-Spot Concentration Measure, Cumulative Crime Concentration, Law of Crime Concentration	RAT, Routine Activities Approach, Crime Triangle Framework, Cohen-Felson Theory
Related	4	4
Summary	The crime concentration index quantifies how unevenly crime is distributed across micro-geographic places such as street segments or addresses. Building on Sherman, Gartin, and Buerger's 1989 discovery that a small fraction of addresses produces most calls for police service, and formalized in Weisburd's 2015 'law of crime concentration', it expresses the share of all crime accounted for by the most crime-prone places.	Routine activity theory explains predatory crime not by the supply of motivated offenders but by the everyday structure of legal activities that brings offenders, targets, and the absence of guardians together in space and time. Proposed by Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson in 1979, it argues that crime rates can rise even when offender motivation is constant, because changes in how people work, shop, and spend leisure time alter the opportunities for crime.