Compare methods

	Situational Crime Prevention Analysis	Routine Activity Theory
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1997	1979
Originator	Ronald V. Clarke	Lawrence E. Cohen & Marcus Felson
Type	Opportunity-reduction framework for crime prevention	Theoretical framework for explaining the occurrence of predatory crime
Seminal source	Clarke, R. V. (Ed.). (1997). Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies (2nd ed.). Harrow and Heston. ISBN: 9780911577389	Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44(4), 588–608.
Aliases	SCP, Situational Prevention, Opportunity-Reduction Framework, Twenty-Five Techniques of Situational Crime Prevention	RAT, Routine Activities Approach, Crime Triangle Framework, Cohen-Felson Theory
Related	4	4
Summary	Situational crime prevention (SCP) is a framework, developed by Ronald Clarke, for reducing crime by changing the immediate situations in which it occurs rather than the dispositions of offenders. It diagnoses the specific opportunities that make a crime easy, rewarding, or low-risk and then applies twenty-five practical techniques organized under five mechanisms: increase effort, increase risk, reduce rewards, reduce provocations, and remove excuses.	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.