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Welcome to 21st century
Published Monday, July 13, 2009
We’re living in the digital age, and police officers are no different.
When pre-teens with an iPhone can get a satellite map of their current location and follow their movements in real time, the process of writing out and filing tickets seems outdated. Officers currently take their paper tickets back to the station, where clerks enter all the data and mail any needed information to Montgomery.
State law, however, will soon require departments to submit all data digitally, a task that will require significant expenses.
The city of Clanton recently received some help in that department in the form of a $35,000 grant, which will be enough to equip five police cars with the needed technology.
The computers will allow officers to give tickets and file incident and arrest reports from the field. The information will then be entered into state databases without a paper trail.
It’s great to be green, but the electronic system will have other benefits. Because tickets will be printed instead of written by hand, they are guaranteed to be legible. Disputes about the information entered on the ticket will be avoided.
And, as Clanton Police Chief Brian Stilwell pointed out, the system will likely save departments money in the long run because of increased efficiency. “We will definitely have a good return on our investment,” Stilwell said.
The state has set a 2010 deadline for all tickets to be issued via computers. Is there a countdown app on our iPhones?
- Stephen Dawkins’ column appears each Tuesday. You can reach him at stephen.dawkins@clantonadvertiser.com.
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Posted by 1oldman (anonymous) on July 14, 2009 at 7:06 a.m. (Suggest removal)
This has been a long time coming, and may still be further off than the state has mandated. It appears that many cities/towns are not supportative of this change, and the elected officials are not prone to spend the dollars to comply. I don't know what the statistics are, but they would be much lower, were it not for one or more energetic officer, willing to research to find how to get these grants in order to keep especially our smaller cities and towns in the electronic era. Just a little over three decades ago, so or the more progressive departments were still buying list of tags from the revenue department and the tags had to be looked up by hand, or a call to the revenue department to find out the registration of said tag. Hours and even days could pass before the results would be know. Before I retired, we were experimenting with in car computers, trying to find a mobile network, trying to connect by cellphones. Its amazing how ones needs impact the industry bring on the wireless data transfer to the general population. Now one can run a tag, and get untold information about the vehicle, and I would suspect the owner as well, at least with the right software. Its absolutly amazing, and I'm glad it came about in my lifetime so I could be a small part of it.
The ironey is that the biggest part of this started because of space exploration. Up to that time, computers were the size of rooms, required a controlled envionment, cooled and dust free, and the most useful civilians use was inventory control. Yep, all the wasted space dollars have really reaped our population a windfall of convience, and the changes just keep on coming.
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