Sand Springs Police Using E-Tickets

By Emory Bryan, The News On 6

SAND SPRINGS, OK -- Sand Springs is cutting out the paperwork of traffic tickets, and the police department hopes to save money at the same time.

Officer Benjamin Brandt is one of the first in Sand Springs with a mobile computer that handles the paperwork of traffic tickets.

His department has seven of the machines and plans to buy more, figuring the savings will make up the cost.

"I think one of the biggest thing it will do is eliminate the duplication of effort," said Mike Carter, assistant chief for Sand Springs Police. "We have multiple employees doing the same thing over and over duplicating that data entry and that's going to be a cost savings for the city."

The software that drives it comes from a Tulsa company called Anyware Mobile Solutions.

"So they can literally now, in the right situation, they could write four tickets in the same time it used to take for them to write one on paper," said Eric Fultz with Anyware Mobile Solutions.

The result is a paper ticket for the driver, printed at the scene, but everything else is digital, either punched in or scanned.

"So right off the bat we're saving time by scanning the driver's license and it automatically pre-populates all the information from the driver's license," Fultz said.

For officers, the time savings could get them off the side of the road sooner or allow them to write more tickets in the same amount of time.

"We are at the point where we'll speed things up for the violator," Carter said. "It's bad enough you have to get a ticket, you might as well be on your way sooner, and that's what this does."

The machine costs $3,700 for each police car, but Sand Springs figures the city will save enough money in manpower to make up the cost.

The same company says it has sold the units to police departments in Krebs and Talala.

The Tulsa Police department has decided to change over to electronic ticketing, but is still working to buy the units, possibly from an out-of-state company.