By Shannon Fiecke and Shawn Hogendorf

The next time you’re pulled over for speeding in Scott County, you’ll likely be handed a computerized printout instead of a handwritten ticket.

For months, local law enforcement officers have been switching to “e-tickets,” as information technology workers labor to transition the county’s records system from a paper-backed to completely electronic enterprise.  

For the public, not much has changed. The electronic ticket has a similar format as the old version.

But the benefit of the new system for law enforcement and court staff is expected to be tremendous.  

The new technology is expected to reduce errors and eliminate countless hours spent manually entering ticket data. That said, getting the new software to jive with the records systems has been trickier than expected, frustrating initial users when it hasn’t worked the way it’s supposed to, especially given the money spent on the system.  

Watch video of new software

Departments throughout the county have gradually been transitioning over to e-tickets, with all county deputies currently using them and the Shakopee police force only weeks away from full implementation. Early adopters — like the Savage Police Department — have helped work out kinks in the system.

By capturing driver license information electronically, Shakopee police Capt. Craig Robson said the new system will save officers from manually copying driver information, and it will eliminate errors that come from handwritten tickets, such as a misspelled names or poor penmanship.

 With large numbers of tickets being processed, “every minute saved on that stuff is significant,” he said.

How it works

Under the old system, a police officer issued a paper ticket to an offender and then sent copies of the citation to police support staff, which again ran driver’s license numbers and vehicle registrations. The citation information was then entered into New World, a record-management system, and more copies of the records were sent off to the Scott Joint Prosecution Association and the Scott County Court Administrator’s Office.

Court administration then entered the data into a court records system called the Minnesota Computer Information System (MNCIS).

In theory, this process should be shored up with “e-ticketing,” because the ticket and accompanying driver record information will automatically be entered into databases.

“The goal is to stop duplicating,” said Scott County Deputy Scott Haas, who has helped implement the system.

 Easily an hour’s worth of labor was going into processing a single ticket under the old system, he said. This included the officer’s time to write the ticket, drop tickets off for records staff (for deputies, this can actually be about an hour alone), as well as records’ staff’s time to enter the data and transport tickets to the courthouse.

Under the e-ticketing system – owned and operated by a Florida-based company called Advanced Public Safety – the officer swipes the violator’s identification card and enters vehicle information from a drop-down menu. The officer then selects from a list of codes and statutes from another menu. The program automatically selects a court date, instead of requiring an officer to select a date six weeks out from a calendar, with the potential error of selecting a day judges are gone.

Once the e-ticket is completed, the officer prints off the ticket for the offender, and at the same time the citation is automatically entered into the police records database. In the future, the citation also will be imported directly into the statewide court database.  

Clerical staff, which has had to decipher handwriting from a carbon copy and deal with tickets that might have been crumpled or gotten wet, can work on other tasks.

“That’s a huge, huge savings of time,” Haas said.

Sheriff’s clerical staff is now spending just a few seconds to verify a ticket was put into the database, vs. five to 10 minutes on each citation entered, Sheriff’s Communications Capt. Jeff Swedin said.

The savings will be the greatest for court staff, which enters ticket info for all agencies in Scott County.

Although it will likely be months before the state allows the county to start flowing electronic information automatically into the statewide database, Haas said court staff’s jobs are already easier using printouts of typewritten tickets. Once the system is fully implemented at the courthouse, an estimated three employees will be freed up from manually entering data.

History

E-ticketing initially came about when Scott County Court Administration received a $30,000 grant it had to “use or lose” at the end of 2007, Prior Lake Police Chief Bill O’Rourke said.

Court administrators reasoned that e-tickets would free up a lot of time police officers and support staff spent on misdemeanor citations. Police records staff, which also had other responsibilities, were getting busier with an increasing number of citations.

Scott County has spent roughly $200,000 on the e-ticketing project, of which about $92,800 is being picked up by the cities, said Swedin.

The cost to equip each squad car with the software and hardware is approximately $1,800, he said. 

Although computer printout tickets aren’t uncommon, Scott County is ahead of other local governments in its efforts to flow the information directly into police record and court databases, Haas said.

Once the program is fully installed, the ongoing costs for cities will be minuscule, except to equip new squad cars. The county will be picking up the yearly annual maintenance.

After a year of working with the system, Savage police and staff are giving the system rave reviews.

It ensures citations are legible for records personnel and court administration, saves data entry and ensures more accuracy, said Katie Vail, a records specialist at the Savage Police Department who has worked with the county on the new program for the last year.

If an officer forgets to fill out field, the system will alert the officer, Swedin said.

The statutes are also all there, so an officer doesn’t have to thumb through state codes.

Previously, if an error was made with written tickets and it was caught by court administration, it would take almost two weeks to correct, Vail said. With e-tickets, if an error is made, the ticket is sent back immediately and the officer can make the correction on the same shift, while the traffic stop is still fresh in the officer’s mind.

 “The old system is plagued by completely disparate databases that don’t have the ability to talk, and humans doing the transmissions in between,” Haas said. “That just opens the doors for errors.”

Many agencies have “glorified” tickets, where they issue a printed ticket, but still manually enter that information, Swedin said. Scott is one of the few counties in the state, he said, with multiple agencies using e-tickets and also sending all the information electronically.

The bugs

An additional benefit of the new software is a voice-activation feature that allows officers to run license plates by saying the plate number instead of typing it into a computer. This keeps their eyes more on the road. The system alerts the officer if the vehicle was reported stolen, and a different alert sounds if a driver’s license wasn’t valid.

“There are all kinds of neat things involved,” O’Rourke said.

Voice-activation technology isn’t perfect, however, and the system recognizes some voices better than others. It’s been particularly ineffective for female officers.

The other perks of the system are beginning to come to fruition, but only because of tireless work by IT workers in the county, O’Rourke said. A lot of the problems are a simple fix, but it hasn’t worked the way it was described initially, he said. Scott County IT has done the bulk of the work on the system.

Part of the issue was software didn’t interface with the police record-management system, O’Rourke said.

For the past year, the county’s IT department has been working with Advanced Public Safety to work out a plethora of bugs with the interface in an attempt to get the new system up and running.

A lot of time also had to be spent building the system, entering street and ordinance data, Swedin said.

Savage police have been the “guinea pigs” for e-ticketing for the last year, Chief Rodney Seurer said. As the agency at the forefront of the countywide technology, the support staff of the Savage department has worked hard to collaborate with the county to get rid of any issues that came up from going electronic, he said.

With the Shakopee department having been shorthanded with its records staff, “we’re thankful the other agencies led the way,” said Shakopee’s Robson.

The transition has been a huge source of frustration for the Prior Lake Police Department, however.

“It’s frustrating because the potential [of e-ticketing] is tremendous, but thus far the payback is dismal,” said O’Rourke.  

Others say the major kinks have largely been worked out, with the new electronic records database going live recently with no issues following months of testing.

While not all are as pessimistic as O’Rourke, everyone acknowledges the road to implementation has been difficult. And many consider complications a small price for the eventual payback.

Seurer acknowledged there were a quite a few frustrations in the last year getting the New World program to gel with the ticket-writing program, but Savage hasn’t had any “real serious issues in the last four or five months,” he said.

All of Jordan’s main squad cars now have the equipment, and although Chief Bob Malz heard initial rumblings of issues with the system — which he’d expect from anything new — he’s heard it’s working pretty well now.

There have been many police chief meetings where e-ticketing has been a hot topic. Advanced Public Safety is aware of the problems with the system, Seurer added.

Savage and the county have both dedicated a tremendous amount of time to the new system by using the system and reporting back what is and isn’t working, Seurer said. The county IT department has fixed the problems, he added.

“When you spend the kind of money we spent, you expect a program as good as apple pie, and when you find moldy apples in the middle of that pie, there are a lot of frustrations,” Seurer said. “But it is getting better the more we are working with it, and in the end, it is going to be a great system.”

Shannon Fiecke can be reached at (952) 345-6679 or sfiecke@swpub.com. Shawn Hogendorf can be reached at (952) 345-6374 or shogendorf@swpub.com.