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The purpose of this paper is to examine food safety behaviors of consumers and employees at university food courts.

Using a smartphone-based observation technique, a total of 149 consumers and 34 employees were observed at three food courts at a mid-western university in the USA. The observational tool recorded 30 sequential transactions of each individual, allowing researchers to identify the compliance rate to the rubric. Both descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis of variance were used for data analysis.

This study found a low compliance rate of food safety practices among consumers and employees at university food courts. Consumers’ food safety practices varied depending on gender, observed ethnicity and party size, while none of those factors was significant for employees. Specifically, females, Caucasians, and lone diners showed higher non-compliance rates than those of males, non-Caucasians and group diners.

The results of the study raise the pressing needs of developing effective risk communication strategies at university food courts for both consumers and employees in order to reduce the potential risk of foodborne illness outbreaks.

University food courts are not only major foodservice operations for on-campus populations as well as off-campus visitors and the local public, but also the presence of shared dining area pertains the potential risk of foodborne illnesses. However, lack of attention has been paid to the food safety issues at university food courts, and especially food safety behaviors of consumers. This study extended the knowledge of previous food safety literature by adopting a smartphone-based observation technique and developing a rubric customized for consumers and employees at university food courts.

We explore the relationship between urbanicity and police officers’ perceptions of changes in their reactive and proactive work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using the 2021 survey of 1,262 Croatian police offices (436 police officers from a large urban community, 471 police officers from small towns and 155 from rural communities), we examine the perceived changes in their reactive activities (e.g. responses to the calls for service, arrests for minor crimes) and proactive activities (e.g. community policing activities, directed patrols) during the peak month of the pandemic compared to before the pandemic.

The majority of police officers in the study, regardless of the size of the community where they lived, reported no changes before and during the pandemic in reactive and proactive activities. Police officers from urban communities and small towns were more likely to note an increase in domestic violence calls for service. Police officers from urban communities were also more likely than the respondents from small towns and rural communities to report an increase in the responses to the disturbances of public order. Finally, police officers from small communities were most likely to observe a change in the frequency of traffic stops during the pandemic.

This study is the first one to explore the differences in perceptions of COVID-19-related changes in reactive and proactive police activities in a centralized police system.