In The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), a machine arrives naked in Los Angeles in 1984, sent back from a future in which machines are at war with humanity. Its mission is to kill Sarah Connor, a young waitress who will one day give birth to the leader of the human resistance. The machine—a T-800, a metal skeleton covered in living tissue, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger— knows her name and the city, and little else. So it does what anyone would do: it takes clothes, takes weapons from a gun shop, and opens the phone book. There are three Sarah Connors listed. It kills the first two. The police notice the pattern and the newspapers start talking about a killer who works through the phone book. The third Sarah Connor, the right one, survives the night only because a soldier from the same future, Kyle Reese, has come back to protect her.
// The theoryThree things in the same place at the same time
In 1979 Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson asked a question that criminology had neglected: not why someone becomes an offender, but why a crime happens here and now. Their answer was that a predatory crime needs three things to coincide in space and time: a motivated offender, a suitable target and the absence of a capable guardian. Take away any one of the three and the crime does not happen. The theory was born to explain a paradox: in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, incomes rose and poverty fell, yet crime rose too. Cohen and Felson’s explanation was that everyday life had changed. More homes were empty during the day because more women worked outside them, and goods had become lighter and easier to carry. The number of offenders did not need to change for crime to grow: it was enough for their encounters with unguarded targets to multiply.
The offender that never changes
Routine activity theory takes the offender’s motivation as a given and studies everything else. That is usually its most criticized move. In The Terminator it is the premise of the story. The T-800 is a constant: it does not get tired, it is not deterred and it cannot be persuaded. Reese’s description is almost a definition of the motivated offender in its purest form. And precisely because that piece cannot be modified, the film is forced to play on the other two sides of the triangle. Sarah cannot stop being Sarah Connor, but she can stop being findable. And the one thing that stands between her and the machine is a guardian who is, at first, a single tired man with a shotgun.
// The subjectA target anyone could find
The most disturbing thing about the T-800 is not its strength but its method, which is completely ordinary. It does not need advanced technology to find Sarah: it uses the public phone book, which lists her name and her address. Marcus Felson and Ronald Clarke later summed up what makes a target suitable with the acronym VIVA: value, inertia, visibility and access. Sarah has value only for the machine, but she is extremely visible and accessible: her name is printed in a directory, she lives in a flat she shares with a friend, she works shifts in a diner and she goes out at night like anyone her age. Her routine is normal, and that is exactly what makes her vulnerable. The police do the same deduction from the other side: when two women with the same name are killed on the same day, they understand that the killer is working down a list.
T-800
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// The crackGuardians who were not capable
The film shows the hardest lesson of the theory: a guardian is only useful if he is capable. The police are the formal guardian, and they try. They take Sarah into protective custody at the station, surrounded by officers. The machine walks in, is turned away at the front desk, says “I’ll be back”, and returns minutes later by driving a car through the front door. It kills the officers on duty. What protects Sarah is not the institution but the informal guardian: Reese, who knows what the machine is and does not let her out of his sight. Felson would later distinguish between guardians who protect targets, handlers who keep watch over potential offenders and managers who look after places. In the film the machine has no handler at all—no one in 1984 can restrain it—and the only effective guardian is the one who comes from its own world.
The crack in the theory is the same as its strength. By treating motivation as fixed, routine activity theory works well for opportunistic crimes—thefts, burglaries, assaults that happen because the occasion arose—and less well for a determined offender who seeks out his victim wherever she is. The T-800 is not an opportunist: if Sarah had moved, it would have looked for her elsewhere. Against an offender like that, reducing opportunities buys time but does not end the danger. The theory also says nothing about why someone wants to commit a crime, which is the question most people ask first. Here the answer is outside the film: the machine was programmed by another machine, Skynet, which is the real author of the order.
Prevention is played out on the other two sides
The practical value of routine activity theory is that it moves prevention to places where it can actually be done. It is very hard to change an offender’s motivation; it is much easier to make a target less visible, harder to reach or better watched. Domestic violence services know this well: changing a victim’s address, keeping it out of public records and putting someone trusted beside her are measures of the same family as Sarah’s escape. The other lesson is that formal guardianship—police, alarms, cameras—is only as good as its ability to act at the right moment. A full police station did not stop the T-800. One man who understood the threat did.
Three key ideas
- Routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson, 1979) holds that a crime occurs when a motivated offender, a suitable target and the absence of a capable guardian meet in the same place and time.
- The T-800 is the motivated offender in its purest form, so The Terminator plays out on the other two sides: Sarah Connor was easy to find in the phone book, and only Kyle Reese was able to protect her.
- The crack: the theory explains opportunistic crime better than a determined offender who seeks out a specific victim; reducing opportunities buys time, but it does not remove the threat.
Sources · further reading
- Cohen, L. E. and Felson, M. (1979). “Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach”. American Sociological Review, 44(4), 588-608.
- Felson, M. (1995). “Those Who Discourage Crime”. In J. E. Eck and D. Weisburd (eds.), Crime and Place (Crime Prevention Studies, vol. 4, pp. 53-66). Criminal Justice Press.
- Felson, M. and Clarke, R. V. (1998). Opportunity Makes the Thief: Practical Theory for Crime Prevention. Police Research Series, paper 98. Home Office.
- Cameron, J. (dir.) (1984). The Terminator. Hemdale / Orion Pictures.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is T-800?
T-800 (“El Terminator”) is a villain from Terminator, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. It opened the Los Angeles phone book, turned to the letter C and found three Sarah Connors.
Why does T-800 (The Terminator) become a villain?
The Terminator’s T-800 and routine activity theory: a motivated offender who never tires, a target anyone could find and a night when only one man acted as guardian. Forty years ago Cohen and Felson explained why crime happens where those three things meet.
Which criminological theory explains T-800?
T-800's case is analysed through Routine activities. Routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson, 1979) holds that a crime occurs when a motivated offender, a suitable target and the absence of a capable guardian meet in the same place and time. The T-800 of The Terminator (1984) is the motivated offender taken to the extreme: it does not tire, does not bargain and does not change its target. That is why the whole film is about the other two pieces: how easy it was to find Sarah Connor, and how hard it was to find someone able to protect her.
