eCitations: Just the Ticket to Help Municipalities Maximize Revenue and Enhance Productivity

Electronic ticketing solutions can help municipalities recover millions in lost parking and traffic citation revenue and save thousands more by increasing efficiencies.

Law enforcement is facing a big budget crisis. According to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, funding for state, tribal and local law enforcement for 2009 is down 60 percent from 2008 funding levels. That represents a reduction in funds of an astounding $1.98 billion. And that reduction in funding comes at a time when many police departments across the country have far greater strains on their resources than they did a decade ago.

That’s why it is more critical than ever that law enforcement organizations maximize the revenue they receive from other sources. For instance, fines collected from parking and traffic violations alone can represent up to three percent or more of a city’s revenue. Unfortunately, today, many law enforcement organizations actually lose up to 35 percent of the revenue they could be collecting from parking and traffic citations.

Why? Human error. For every 100 tickets issued by hand daily, up to 35 of those citations will be dismissed due to errors. And that results in a lot of lost revenue.

In fact, in one U.S. city, a full one-third of the 25,000 tickets it issued yearly were automatically dismissed due to illegible handwriting or technical error. This resulted in a revenue loss of nearly half a million dollars per year.

When police departments issue tickets manually, there are many opportunities for error. Names can be misspelled. Addresses can be entered incorrectly. And even after the ticket is issued, errors can still occur because a clerk must enter that same handwritten citation into as many as three records systems, including the police record system, the court case management system and the state’s citation tracking system. In most municipalities, errors on the tickets end up invalidating the citations, and the citations (and thus the fines) are dismissed.

“There are a lot of costs embedded in that citation,” says Anatoly Delm, product marketing manager at Motorola. “And number one is the cost of errors.”

The Benefits of an Electronic Ticketing Solution

Fortunately, there’s an alternative solution that reduces the error and the time involved in the ticketing process. That solution is electronic ticketing, otherwise known as eCitation. Using an electronic ticketing system, police officers can enter a majority of the required citation information into an electronic form automatically. They can do this either by scanning the bar code or magnetic stripe on the violator’s driver’s license or through a realtime connection to the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) or National Crime Information Center (NCIC) databases.

Officers can use drop down menus for violations and vehicle information and can automatically populate information such as fine amounts and court information to further reduce errors. After the ticket is completed, a wireless printer with a Bluetooth connection enables on-the-spot printing of the citation — and if the mobile computer is equipped with image capture, the form can even include the violator’s signature of receipt.

If the device has a real-time wireless connection, the citation information can be immediately transmitted to the appropriate databases. For mobile devices without a real-time connection, the citation information can be uploaded in the office at the end of the day by simply docking the device in its cradle — or if a wireless Local Area Network (LAN) is in place, the device can upload records automatically as soon as the officer enters the station.

eCitation Systems Allow Departments to Recapture Millions of Dollars in Lost Revenue

The results of the electronic ticketing system are nothing short of amazing: One major city recaptured several millions of dollars in lost revenue in just the first year after implementing an eCitation solution.

Take a look at the potential eCitation solutions have to increase a city’s revenue: If a city issues 200,000 citations a year and reduces its error rate on these citations by a conservative 15 percent, the city would collect revenue from 30,000 additional citations per year. If the average fine amount was $75, the amount of additional revenue collected each year would amount to $2.25 million.

Citation Processing Reduced from Days to Hours

Automating the ticketing process improves cash flow as well. A manual citation takes an average of 12 days to process (which of course delays the final payment of fines), while automated solutions can reduce that time to hours or even seconds. In the state of Iowa, crash reports that used to take up to 18 months to complete now take only 8 hours, thanks to the ability to share information with all pertinent parties.

Increased Productivity Can Result in 1,600 Additional Patrol Hours

With manual ticketing systems, it takes about 10 to 15 minutes for officers to issue a citation. In contrast, electronic systems allow officers to issue a ticket within just two to three minutes. Bar code scanning alone has been credited with eliminating up to 200 keystrokes per traffic citation by automating and ensuring the accurate entry of the information contained on a driver’s license.

Let’s say an agency has 20 patrol officers who each issue five traffic citations a day. With just a five-minute time-savings per citation, the productivity savings in one year is more than 1,600 hours of patrol time.

“It’s almost like getting an extra officer for free,” says Delm.

And municipalities save on the back end too – through a reduced need for data entry clerks to enter the citation information into multiple systems. Assuming that cities could redeploy two data entry personnel with salaries of $60,000 a year into other jobs, that’s another $120,000 in savings each year.

“Just being able to read the writing on the ticket, and the fact that it is transmitted automatically to the court system, reduces time for court personnel to spend transcribing all that information,” says Russell Brown, police officer and manager of information services in the Baltimore Police Department.

The bottom line is that with all these savings, municipalities can easily get a return on the upfront cost of their eCitation systems within a year or even less.

Improved Officer Safety

And given that an electronic ticketing solution enables officers to clear traffic stops three to five times faster, it increases officer safety as well – particularly given that roadside traffic stops are the second most deadly incidents encountered by law enforcement officials.

“The longer that an officer is sitting there exposed to the side of the road, the greater the chance of injury to the officer,” Delm says.

eCitation: Highly Useful for a Variety of Municipal Needs

And it is not just law enforcement officials who can benefit from electronic citation technology. From building and bridge to food safety inspections, inspectors using automated citation technology can access electronic customer records and enter inspection results using a series of drop down boxes and notes fields for additional comments.

There’s no longer a need to complete a paper form and later enter the information captured on that form into the computer. And this helps to eliminate the errors inherent in the ‘double touch’ of data. Plus the resulting productivity boost allows the same number of inspectors to handle more inspections each day, thus improving the efficiency of the inspection process.

All Electronic Ticketing Systems Are Not the Same

While the benefits of an eCitation system are easy to recognize, selecting the right eCitation system can be a challenge – particularly given that there are so many different types of electronic ticketing systems to consider. That’s why selecting a partner that can help customize a solution to fit a department’s specific needs is so critical.

It is important to know that although the majority of states allow law enforcement agencies to provide violators with a customized citation printout, a handful of states still do not allow their officers to use anything other than the standard multi-part form. Public safety agencies in the states that require the multi-part form can still deploy an electronic ticketing solution – they just have to use a mobile computer and a high-impact printer to print out this form.

In the states that do not require this form, municipalities can choose from one of the many different handheld solutions that are available. But departments should be aware that it is not easy to customize citation forms for each municipality. Thus they should check carefully that the software supported by an electronic ticketing solution – and the hardware that it works with – meets their unique needs. And municipalities should definitely check the system’s ability to comply with the data transfer protocols needed to communicate with the various back-end databases such as the state and court case management systems.

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