COUNTYWIDE : Supervisors OK Purchase of 15 Ticketing Computers

Break a traffic law in Thousand Oaks this summer, and you could find yourself staring down the barrel of a shockproof, battery-powered, 64-kilobyte--computer.

The County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to buy 15 hand-held computers so sheriff’s deputies can issue traffic tickets within seconds and reduce paperwork delays in Municipal Court.

The supervisors voted 5 to 0 to spend $93,900 on a pilot program to use the computers in Thousand Oaks, Camarillo and Moorpark-- cities where traffic is the heaviest in the county, said Asst. Sheriff Oscar Fuller, head of the sheriff’s patrol division.

The California Highway Patrol has been using the computers, built by Radix Corp. of Salt Lake City and slightly smaller than a carton of cigarettes, since October, 1990.

During a traffic stop, a deputy will input information about the driver and the violation by typing it on a key pad, said Lt. Joe Funchess, head of the sheriff’s Thousand Oaks traffic division.

In the case of newer California licenses that have magnetic strips, the deputy will be able to slide the license through a data slot to automatically input the driver’s name, address and license number, he said.

The computer then can be plugged into an equally small printer, which will be carried on a shoulder strap or attached to the patrol car or motorcycle, Funchess said.

The printer will spit out two paper copies of the ticket, one for the driver to keep and one the driver must sign for the court file, Funchess said.

At shift’s end, the deputy will plug the computer into the headquarters’ computer and download the information from as many as 818 traffic citations to the Municipal Court computer system. Then the court clerk will send the driver notice of a court date within 24 hours instead of the two weeks it now takes with traffic citations written on paper, Funchess said.

“The whole filing process is eliminated,” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll have everything on line--barring any major problems--by summertime.”

If the program is successful, the county may buy more computers for use by deputies in other jurisdictions, he said.