Hamburg approves e-ticket software for police cars
HAMBURG — The Hamburg Borough Council approved a measure to make the lives of their police officers a bit easier on April 7.
E-ticket software is “the growing trend” in the area, Councilman Dan Barr announced before opening the floor to civilian Police Director Wayne Yahm, noting that Franklin bought the software in 2002.
With free installation in Hamburg’s three patrol vehicles, the software will allow an officer to swipe a driver’s license through the device like a credit-card machine. The software will then automatically populate the fields of the ticket with the driver’s information — the officer only has to type in the violation and press print. The driver gets a ticket that looks like a supermarket cash register receipt and the summons information is transferred directly to the courthouse.
“No more dealing with ticket books,” Barr said — which nearly eliminates any possibility of mistakes made in the manual ticket-writing process.
The borough had the option to purchase the software outright for $20,000 or lease it under a three-year contract, which comes with free service and maintenance of the software and a per-ticket charge of $6.06 for the first 800 tickets and $4.41 for every ticket after for the remainder of the lease. The cost will be taken directly from the municipal portion of the fine paid by the ticketed driver.
Yahm recommended the three-year lease, which the council unanimously approved.
A question was brought up by the council about officers being hyper-productive with their ticket writing because of the ease of use of the software, but Yahm assuaged their fears.
“They’ll be doing their normal amounts,” he said, “just processing the tickets faster.”
The department averages just fewer than 800 tickets per year, which will make the finance cost about $11,500 over the course of the three-year lease.
When asked how the court feels about the changeover to the e-ticket software, Yahm said the judge “is lukewarm on it,” but will go along with it.