The effect of ‘third party’ pressure on police crime recording practice

Recorded crime is best seen nowadays as an output measure of the delivery of public police services. This note concerns the effect of ‘third-parties’ on the recording as crime of incidents brought to the attention of the police. Third-party pressures are those that emanate from sources other than the complainant who reports an incident and the police officers who deal with that report. There are a variety of such third-party pressures that have a systematic influence on the aggregate patterns and trends observed in the recorded crime statistics, including moral pressure, insurers’ requirements, performance targets, and recording standards themselves. • The gap between the public’s propensity to report crime to the police and the police decision to record it creates a ‘grey figure’. • The grey figure also reflects systematic performance adjustment on the part of the police who seek to reconcile third party pressures with the capacities and resources at their disposal. Three strategies of adjustment can be identified: not-crimeing, no-crimeing, and down-crimeing. Evidence is presented whereby these possible effects can be inferred. Combinations of third-party pressure and systematic performance adjustment have complex and variable effects on the recorded crime statistics. While it might be possible in principle to change these third-party pressures so as to ‘nudge’ crime recording in more accurate and reliable directions, in practice this might be a substantial undertaking since they reflect the complex social and political arrangements of the delivery and accountability of public police service

Immunity, safety and protection of an Adenovirus 5 prime--Modified Vaccinia virus Ankara boost subunit vaccine against Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis infection in calves.

Vaccination is the most cost effective control measure for Johne's disease caused by Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) but currently available whole cell killed formulations have limited efficacy and are incompatible with the diagnosis of bovine tuberculosis by tuberculin skin test. We have evaluated the utility of a viral delivery regimen of non-replicative human Adenovirus 5 and Modified Vaccinia virus Ankara recombinant for early entry MAP specific antigens (HAV) to show protection against challenge in a calf model and extensively screened for differential immunological markers associated with protection. We have shown that HAV vaccination was well tolerated, could be detected using a differentiation of infected and vaccinated animals (DIVA) test, showed no cross-reactivity with tuberculin and provided a degree of protection against challenge evidenced by a lack of faecal shedding in vaccinated animals that persisted throughout the 7 month infection period. Calves given HAV vaccination had significant priming and boosting of MAP derived antigen (PPD-J) specific CD4+, CD8+ IFN-γ producing T-cell populations and, upon challenge, developed early specific Th17 related immune responses, enhanced IFN-γ responses and retained a high MAP killing capacity in blood. During later phases post MAP challenge, PPD-J antigen specific IFN-γ and Th17 responses in HAV vaccinated animals corresponded with improvements in peripheral bacteraemia. By contrast a lack of IFN-γ, induction of FoxP3+ T cells and increased IL-1β and IL-10 secretion were indicative of progressive infection in Sham vaccinated animals. We conclude that HAV vaccination shows excellent promise as a new tool for improving control of MAP infection in cattle