Fairfax County police launched a computer system in January
that was supposed to eliminate mountains of paperwork and allow officers to
enter traffic tickets, arrest data and vital intelligence into an online system
that would be instantly available to detectives and anyone who needed it.
But the start has been rocky: Through mid-May, Fairfax
officers wrote 17,600 fewer traffic tickets, saying that the new system is
cumbersome and requires them to write tickets electronically and on paper. The
drop was nearly 28 percent compared with the same period last year and
translated into more than $1 million in lost revenue for Fairfax, a 30 percent
decrease from last year. Drunken-driving tickets have dropped by 24 percent.
Police officials said that they expected a drop in tickets
as officers were trained in the new system and that officers would spend more
time writing the 150,000 or more tickets Fairfax issues each year because
patrol cars do not have bar code scanners or printers.
"It's being phased in," Col. Jim Morris said of
the missing technology. He said the sharp decline in tickets is "something
we're going to overcome. If it's still down . . . at the end of the summer,
then we'll take another look."
Police officials cited other factors in this year's drop in
tickets: the February snowstorms, an exceptionally high number of tickets
written last year and the removal of 120 officers from the street every week
for training during the first three months of the year.
But besides the reduction in traffic tickets and revenue,
officers and commanders are worried about the safety of officers more focused
on their laptops than on their surroundings. "Any time you have an officer
sitting along the side of the road, there's a danger issue," Morris said.
Officer Marshall Thielen, president of the Fairfax officers'
union, said four officers in Washington state were fatally shot last year while
immersed in their laptops. "We are targets," Thielen said.
Although police anticipated a learning curve as officers
adapted to a new way of writing paperless reports, "we're beyond the
learning curve," Thielen said. "We're all aware of the system. The
problem is, we are now tasked with doing data entry. The system is not user
friendly. It's fine if you're a data entry-type person, a computer guy. But the
average cop is not a data entry cop. That's not what we signed up for. It's
just not our thing."
Factors in decline
Officers said the decline in tickets can be attributed to
two things: First, officers spend far more time writing summonses and reports,
so their production declines. Second, some officers may simply not want the
aggravation of spending a half-hour ticketing someone who didn't come to a full
stop before turning right, so they may look the other way.
The aggravation of writing reports runs deep among officers
on the street. In particular, many said, the new system, called I/LEADS, requires
them to fill in many different screens, rather than writing on one or two
sheets of paper, and when I/LEADS finds an error, officers said, it doesn't
tell where in the report the error is.
"One simple mistake causes you to pull your hair
out," one officer said. "You have to search to fix it. It takes a
half-hour."
Police commanders and information technology specialists
said they are listening to the officers' complaints and adjusting. They have
extended the life of a 24-hour help desk, and commanders have reduced the
number of incidents that require a report to be filed.
"I/LEADS tries to force us, in real time, to be more
accountable," said Lt. Archie Pollard of the IT bureau, rather than having
supervisors find errors hours or weeks later. Officers will adjust as they use
the system, Pollard said, and they will write more tickets and complain less.
"Are we proficient? Yes," Pollard said. "In a
year, I hope we'll be very good."
Fairfax police have long struggled with technology,
especially when it comes to statistics and records management. The last time
the county bought a computer-aided dispatch system, in 2004, it failed so often
and functioned so poorly that it was trashed, well before its minimum 10-year
lifespan.
Part of the problem was that the Altaris dispatch system
from Northrop Grumman didn't mesh with a county-created records management
system -- the way police keep track of crime, traffic tickets, response times,
virtually everything they do. In 2007, the county bought a $23 million system
from Intergraph with integrated computer dispatch and records management, and
in January it went online.
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