Nobody cares what is considered a cheat.
Why exactly are you looking for ways to check mobs in your area on the client side?
If you want to get a list of mobs in the player's area one way I can think of off the top of my head is to make a tickhandler that gets entities from the world using something like this:
List players = world.getEntitiesWithinAABB(EntityPlayer.class, //or use EntityMob since you're looking for mobs.
new AxisAlignedBB(
playerCoord.x - area,
playerCoord.y - area,
playerCoord.z - area,
playerCoord.x + area,
playerCoord.y + area,
playerCoord.z + area)); //formatted so it's not a huge string of text.
for(int i = 0; i < players.size(); i++){
do stuff
}
which gets you a list of all players around the player. I'm fairly sure that method should work just fine on the client. (Though I might be mistaken.) (Edit: I just tested it out, it works pretty fine!)
If you want to keep using that event you could alternatively try sending a packet to the client. But if you're making a radar of sorts there's not really any reason to bother the client with it. Unless you really want to. If you're doing anything to these other entities, however. You probably do want to make a packet and execute your code Server side.