With the punch of several buttons, the Kansas City Police Department made a little history on Tuesday morning. At 7:44 a.m., a woman driving 20 miles an hour over the posted speed limit on U.S. Highway 71 near Truman Road received the first department-issued e-ticket.
Four traffic officers are testing hand-held devices that print receiptlike citations. The department is moving away from the handwritten, everything-in-triplicate system that makes Municipal Court feel like the 1970s never ended.
The department says 68 e-tickets were issued in the first 24 hours that the hand-held devices were operational. Chief James Corwin discussed the new technology on his blog:
We're using this week to identify any bugs with the system and test the officers' learning curve. When they first started, the test officers took about 12 minutes to issue an e-ticket. But amazingly, within 24 hours they'd already returned to close to their normal traffic-stop time of about 5 minutes.By the week of August 22, all patrol officers will be using the hand-helds to issue e-tickets and, perhaps, communicate with Skynet.
