| Ticketing system meets the 21st century |
By: JIM HAMMERAND, Staff Writer
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Posted: Friday, April 3, 2009 7:46 pm
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1) Officer scans magnetic strip on driver’s license, data is sent to 2) the in-squad computer, which fills out the fields, sending the e-ticket to 3) the dashboard printer for delivery to the traffic violator and 4) the courthouse via wireless card.
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Rice County drivers better be able to come up with quicker excuses now that a faster ticketing system is in use.
Law enforcement agencies in the county made the official switch this week to e-ticketing, put into use to ease the burden of paperwork on officers and record-keepers.
Piggybacking on new case management software, equipment in Faribault, Northfield and Rice County patrol vehicles has shifted the paper-based system to one that prints a copy for a driver and transmits the ticket wirelessly to the Rice County Courthouse and police records.
Steele County and other agencies across the state are also implementing the system.
Last year, an officer writing a ticket would have given the driver a copy, saved a copy for police records and sent the original to the courthouse for prosecution. The last two records were entered by hand into separate databases.
“We end up handling that ticket three or four times during the life of that ticket,” said Faribault Police Chief Dan Collins. “(Now) we’re minimizing the duplication of effort on different people’s parts.”
Officers can click on their in-squad computer to initiate a ticket on a driver after swiping the license’s magnetic strip, transfer the vehicle information from the state’s registration database, and select the violation and applicable statute from a drop-down list.
This cuts down on the time it takes an officer to write a ticket, said Northfield Police Chief Mark Taylor, meaning less time between catch and release for allegedly unlawful drivers.
An average seven- or eight-minute traffic stop could be shortened to five, Taylor said, freeing officers to spend more time on patrol and less on paperwork throughout the shift.
“It’s efficiency not only from our end, but it’s efficiency all through the system,” he said.
Entering a traffic citation into the court’s computer system by hand takes three to four minutes, Rice County Court Administrator Bob Langer said, and longer if it’s hard to read. But Langer said it’s too early to tell just how much more efficient his staff will be.
“If we don’t have to enter citations, it’s going to save us some time, but until we get into it further, I don’t know how much time we’re going to save,” Langer said.
Putting e-ticketing into practice in Rice and Steele county law enforcement agencies cost $70,000, said Rice County Sheriff Richard Cook. A grant from the Third Judicial District covered half of those costs.
“Our budgets definitely are tight and are being more scrutinized. This is a way of better utilizing our time,” Cook said.
— Staff Writer Jim Hammerand may be reached at 645-1114 or jhammerand@northfieldnews.com. |
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