Hotspots policing, place-based policing and predictive policing are members of a family approaches that has captured the policing research zeitgeist. What they have in common is they describe a crime prevention process that starts with the identification of spatial concentrations of crime. The current focus and interest in place-based approaches to prevention can be directly traced back to the seminal Sherman, Gartin, and Buerger (1989) hotspots study of Cincinatti. They found that a mere 3 % of locations accounted for half of the city’s calls for service, and that even areas considered high in crime actually experience substantial clustering (i.e. many locations in the worst neighbourhoods had no crime). It is ironic that one of the first criminological studies was spatial in nature, Quetelet’s moral statistics (Beirne, 1987), and yet this approach fell out of favour for most of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the modern “criminology of place" inspired by Sherman and its utility for prevention.