The Crime as Opportunity Theory is not an explanation for crime. It is a truism because no crime can happen without an opportunity. The characteristics of opportunity are attributes of the crime scene data they do not explain it.
Saying that opportunity causes crime is like saying eohippus causes evolution.
Science keeps its explanations separate from the data it seeks to explain. Crime Science has failed to understand this basic scientific principle.
Opportunity occurs at the crime scene. There must have been an opportunity for any crime to have taken place. Therefore, it is a mere truism, not an explanation since it adds nothing more than an observation of characteristics and behaviour.
For example, an eohippus in the fossil record does not explain the origin of species. For that we needed Darwin's theory of evolution. Fossils cannot explain themselves. Eohippus cannot explain itself anymore than it can explain a horse - or perhaps more plausibly a fox. But the fossil record can refute Darwin's theory. If an eohippus ever turns up in the the Jurassic strata then we're going to need a new theory to explain it. Good scientific theories are refutable. Good scientific theories are hard to vary. The Crime as Opportunity explanation - being a mere truism - is impossible to refute. And it is infinitely variable as a post-hoc explanation. This makes it a bad explanation that adds nothing to knowledge of causality.
What crime as opportunity is, is a good discovery of the characteristics of crime.
But crime does not, and cannot, explain itself by is characteristics. For that we need a theory that explains why people are where they are, doing what they are doing and making particular choices that are driven by particular motivations within a given context.
Read the Crime Science dysology here.
