Shelves of uncollected old tickets going back several decades will eventually be scanned into computers at the tribunal.

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

A new computer program is making it easier and faster for police officers to give you a ticket.

The program, called E-Citation, links the computer in an officer’s car to the state Department of Motor Vehicles and fills in much of the information normally written on tickets by hand. The program then allows the ticket to be transmitted automatically to the state Traffic Tribunal, eliminating the possibility of lost or fixed tickets.

The software was first installed in state police vehicles three years ago and gradually spread to six local police departments : Burrillville, Portsmouth, North Kingstown, Narragansett, East Providence and, as of October, Pawtucket. The goal is to outfit every police department with the program by May.

“It takes out a lot of the questions of ‘where did that ticket go, who touched it?’ ” said Lt. Larry Guglietta of the Burrillville Police Department. “The officer has it, hands it to the defendant, a copy goes to the station, and a copy goes to the court. It’s a closed system.”

Here’s how it works: when a motorist is stopped, the officer keys in the license-plate number for the car directly into a program in the laptop computer in the cruiser. The program links to the Division of Motor Vehicles’ database and automatically fills in the registration information from the registry. The officer fills in the reason for the ticket and a copy prints in the cruiser. . That copy is given to the motorist while another copy is electronically transmitted to the police station. A Police Department supervisor reviews the ticket within seven hours of issuance and then the ticket is transmitted electronically to the traffic court, where it is double checked for accuracy and added to the daily court docket.

So far this year, more than 32,917 e-citations have been issued, according to Judiciary records. There were51,799 electronic citations issued in 2008.

The system not only helps officers save time on paperwork, but it also helps the Traffic Tribunal run more efficiently and minimizes confusion over a citation-related court date associated with an officer’s penmanship in a hand-written ticket, said Chief Magistrate William Guglietta, head of the Rhode Island Traffic Tribunal (and brother to Lieutenant Guglietta).

“[The old book tickets] require an officer to write everything down,” Guglietta said recently as he watched the proceedings in traffic court. He picked up a paper ticket sitting on one of the tables. “This officer did a very good job. He’s a good printer, but a lot of times we get tickets that are hard to read, and the court is trying to figure out what happened. … The e-citation document is so much better because we’re able to read and process the document better for court, for the motorist and the administration of justice.”

The advances are saving some money as well. Book tickets cost roughly 50 cents per citation, while the e-citations are produced at a cost of 27 cents per citation.

As a joint effort between the Judicial Technology Center and the Office of Highway Safety, the electronic ticket program uses federal racial profiling and traffic records money to outfit police cruisers with the necessary printers.

The e-citation program is built to operate on IMC, a computer platform that most police departments use with their in-cruiser computers, said Janis Loiselle, administrator for the Office of Highway Safety. Providence and New Shoreham use a different service, which will develop a parallel program to work on that platform. In order to qualify for the federal funds, the DOT must collect and analyze driver and passenger data for every stop. Current software collects driver information, but not passenger race. The DOT is seeking a company to analyze the data, and waiting on IMC to update the software with the necessary fields, before installing the program in cruisers across the state.

If the cruisers have an in-car computer already — as most do — and are already using a standard program, they just need to install the printers –– at a cost of about $800 to $900 per car. The program will not pay to outfit any cruisers with computers.

tbuford@projo.com