No abstract

Purpose – The ability of the police to decrease victimization rates, protect human rights and social capital, to generate feelings of safety and to respond to citizens’ calls helps generate positive citizen feelings about the legitimacy of police as a law enforcement institution. Police approaches to reduce crime and violence are based mainly on objective measures, neglecting to assess its performance based on subjective perceptions. The conception that the citizens’ fear of being victims is not always reflective of the actual prevalence of crime highlights the importance of social surveys to assess the public’s perception of police performance. It is also important to assess employee satisfaction, since research indicates that the performance of first-line employees is influenced by their satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to provide the first comparative study of both citizen and police officer satisfaction and evaluates their relationship. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on a dyadic survey that measures citizens’ evaluation of police service quality as well as policemen’s job satisfaction. The data were analysed using the multicriteria methodology of multicriteria satisfaction analysis. Findings – The results showed that policemen seem to be unsatisfied with their jobs, while citizens are quite satisfied with police performance. Specifically, policemen’s ability to be available for patrol is currently hampered by bureaucracy and other typical obligations. The tangibles criterion, which refers to buildings, offices and surveillance equipment, were characterized as inadequate by both policemen and citizens. It was also observed that police officers are not very satisfied with their amount of work may be the reason why citizens report median satisfaction levels in terms of police responsiveness. Originality/value – This survey adds to management literature on job satisfaction and service quality, providing some additional findings regarding the police population. In addition, it combines related constructs supporting the claim that citizens can be satisfied with police services provided that police officers are satisfied with their jobs.

Traceability, namely the ability to access information about a product and its movement across all stages of the supply chain, has been emerged as a key criterion of a product’s quality and safety. Managing fresh products, such as fruits and vegetables, is a particularly complicated task, since they are perishable with short shelf lives and are vulnerable to environmental conditions. This makes traceability of fresh produce very significant. The present study provides a brief overview of the relative literature on fresh produce traceability systems. It was concluded that the commercially available traceability systems usually neither cover the entire length of the supply chain nor rely on open and transparent interoperability standards. Therefore, a user-friendly open access traceability system is proposed for the development of an integrated solution for traceability and agro-logistics of fresh products, focusing on interoperability and data sharing. Various Internet of Things technologies are incorporated and connected to the web, while an android-based platform enables the monitoring of the quality of fruits and vegetables throughout the whole agri-food supply chain, starting from the field level to the consumer and back to the field. The applicability of the system, named AgroTRACE, is further extended to waste management, which constitutes an important aspect of a circular economy.

Everyday life of the elderly and impaired population living in smart homes is challenging because of possible accidents that may occur due to daily activities. In such activities, persons often lean over (to reach something) and, if they not cautious, are prone to falling. To identify fall incidents, which could stochastically cause serious injuries or even death, we propose specific temporal inference models; namely, CM-I and CM-II. These models can infer a fall incident based on classification methods by exploiting wearable Internet of Things (IoT) altimeter sensors adopted by seniors. We analyzed real and synthetic data of fall and lean over incidents to test the proposed models. The results are promising for incorporating such inference models to assist healthcare for fall verification of seniors in smart homes. Specifically, the CM-II model achieved a prediction accuracy of 0.98, which is the highest accuracy when compared to other models in the literature under the McNemar’s test criterion. These models could be incorporated in wearable IoT devices to provide early warning and prediction of fall incidents to clinical doctors.

During the last decade, the demand for electricity has increased significantly, both for companies and consumers. Therefore, in every country, there are companies developing and functioning to provide various forms of electric energy. The quality of the services that they provide has been of major concern for these companies for the last few years. The objective of this study is to examine residential customers’ satisfaction of electricity providers in Greece regarding various factors, such as the products, services, customer service, and the pricing policy. The present research was conducted with the use of a specially developed website questionnaire; 689 questionnaires were collected from January to June, 2019. The results were analyzed with the multicriteria satisfaction analysis (MUSA) method, which is considered as an aggregation–disaggregation approach developed on the qualitative analysis regression. The results of the study showed that the residential customers were quite satisfied. More specifically, the average global satisfaction index of the residential customers was about 52.15%. Using the results of this study, electricity providers will have the chance to frame their future products and services so as to keep their industrial customers satisfied. This empirical study may serve as a reference for other electricity providers who desire to carry out similar studies in the future.