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Hand-written traffic citations may soon become a thing of the past.
Processing traffic citations or summons is a costly, labor-intensive task that is prone to error. Electronic citation, or e-Citation, systems reduce costs and improve efficiency in most phases of the process.
Data is primarily acquired, first, from the officer copying the driver's license, registration, location, violation and court appearance data from documents at the scene, and second, from memory, both of which can be faulty. Few officers have perfect penmanship, and rain, cold and pen pressure ("Please press firmly; you are making four copies") take their toll on legibility. The officer may enter a location that doesn't exist or mismatch the code section of the violation with its title. He could enter the wrong court appearance date. Any one of these problems can invalidate the citation, thereby wasting everyone's time.
When the officer drops off his completed citations for processing, each is processed by a clerk, who re-enters all of the information into a computer-based system. This is another opportunity for errors to creep in, as the clerk may not be able to read the officer's handwriting or may simply make a typographical error. Many departments add extra coding at this stage for tracking of violation types and locations, and this process is also error-prone.
The citations are next passed on to the court and /or a prosecutor's office, each of which may have its own tracking system requiring re-entry of the citation data, and each offering the chance to make more mistakes.
When the citation makes it to the courtroom, a number of issues could arise: violators may claim they are victims of an impostor using their name or a forged license, the judge may not be able to read the citation, or the violator may exploit one of the errors made along the way to argue that the charge is invalid and should be dismissed. In some agencies, a phone call from an influential person can result in a citation being "taken care of" before it reaches the court. This effectively makes some people immune to the law and fosters distrust in the police and the justice system. The e-Citation systems minimize or eliminate every one of these problems.
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