El tiburón (Bruce): The beach nobody would close

In the coastal town of Amity, a giant great white shark starts devouring swimmers just as the summer season begins — the only one that feeds the whole town. The police chief, Brody, wants to close the beaches immediately. The mayor, Vaughn, flatly refuses: closing the beaches on the Fourth of July weekend would mean economic ruin for Amity. So the beaches stay open, the tourists keep swimming — and the shark keeps eating. Jaws is remembered as the film that invented the blockbuster and the fear of swimming, but beneath its terror lies a precise criminological mechanism: how a danger becomes a catastrophe not so much because of the predator as because of the guardian who decides not to protect.

// The theoryThe predator, the prey and the guardian

We already met, with Anton Chigurh and Joe Goldberg, routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson, 1979): harm occurs when three elements coincide in space and time — a motivated predator, a suitable target and the absence of a capable guardian. Its brilliant insight is that harm depends not so much on how much evil there is as on how many opportunities are left open. In Amity, all three vertices are served up: the shark is the predator (and, like any force of nature, the theory takes it for granted — there is no need to explain its "motivation"); the swimmers, cheerful and unwary, are the perfect target; and the guardian… is the problem. Because Amity's guardian is not absent: he is present and chooses not to act. And that is the most uncomfortable and most real variant of the theory.

Criminology usually describes the lack of a guardian as an absence — no police, no witnesses, no camera. But researchers such as Danielle Reynald have studied the guardian as something more complex: it is not enough for one to be there, they must be willing to intervene. A guardian can fail out of fear, laziness, not wanting trouble — or, as in Amity, because of a conflict of interest. Mayor Vaughn does not ignore the danger: he knows it perfectly well. But closing the beaches has an economic cost he is not willing to pay, so he downplays the risk, pushes to reopen, hides the problem. His famous logic — "if you yell 'shark,' you've got a panic on the Fourth of July" — is not innocent denial: it is the calculated decision of a guardian who puts business before protection. The shark kills; but the one who leaves the door open is him.

// The subjectThe monster that was not the villain

The most revealing thing about Jaws is that the shark, despite being the monster, is not quite the villain. A shark is not evil: it is an animal doing what sharks do — hunting where there is prey. Routine activity theory captures this perfectly: the natural predator, like the impulsive criminal, need not be "understood" or morally judged; it is enough to know that it will exist and will appear wherever it finds opportunity. The film's real moral drama is not in the water, but on land — in the human decision to leave people exposed. The shark is a force; the mayor, a choice. And there the film, without meaning to, delivers a first-rate criminological lesson: when a tragedy happens, the most useful question is not only "what monster caused it?", but "who had the power and the duty to shut the door, and why didn't they?". The shark is forgotten the moment we leave the cinema; the mayor who kept the beaches open is the one who should really keep us awake at night.

// The flawThe danger of blaming the prey

Routine activity theory has a flaw that must be watched closely: by focusing on the target and on reducing opportunities, it can slide toward blaming the victim — "they shouldn't have gone swimming", "they asked for it by getting in the water". It is the same error we saw with cyberstalking, and with the shark it is clear why it is unjust: Amity's swimmers had no way of knowing the danger, precisely because the guardian hid it from them. Placing the responsibility on those who expose themselves unknowingly is to excuse the one who had the duty to warn and protect. The theory describes the opportunities that facilitate harm; it does not hand out blame for falling into a trap that someone else knowingly kept open. The responsibility, in Amity, does not lie with those who went swimming: it lies with the one who knew and did not close it.

And there is a second side, the hopeful one. If harm depends on opportunity and on the guardian, then it can be prevented by reinforcing precisely that vertex — without waiting to change the "nature" of the predator. The situational prevention studied by Ronald Clarke rests on this: not on eliminating every shark from the sea (impossible), but on closing the beaches when needed, posting lookouts, nets, warnings — restoring and activating the guardian. The lesson for real policy is direct: many avoidable harms happen not for lack of dangers (there will always be some), but because of guardians who do not act, sometimes out of self-interest. Preventing them is not a matter of more fear or of blaming the victims, but of ensuring that those who have the duty to protect cannot sacrifice it to business — that no mayor can keep the beach open knowing what swims beneath the water.

That is why Jaws, half a century later, is still far more than a summer horror film: it is a perfect parable about responsibility. Its monster is unforgettable, but its real lesson is on dry land — in an office, in the decision of a man who put the season's balance sheet ahead of the swimmers' lives. The criminology of routine activities teaches us to look beyond the predator and to ask about the guardian: who was meant to protect, what did they know and why didn't they act. The shark of Amity was only doing what sharks do. The tragedy was signed by the man who, able to close the beach, decided that the summer was worth more than the people swimming in it.