Speeders to Find Computers Are Just the Ticket : Technology: In a move to save time and cut paperwork, Oxnard police will become the state’s second agency to use hand-held key pads to issue traffic citations.

Surrendering to the technological revolution, Oxnard police officers soon will start ticketing speeders using battery-operated, hand-held computers designed to cut down on paperwork and staff time.

Officers are set next month to begin learning how to use 15 of the calculator-sized devices, which are being loaned free to the city by the Ventura County Municipal Court.

Oxnard is only the second police agency in the state to turn to the burgeoning ticket-writing technology.

“There’s a tremendous potential for saving time and money,” said Sgt. George Pultz, whose traffic division writes about 18,000 traffic tickets a year, more than any other police agency in the county. “I think they will work out very well.”

For the California Highway Patrol, ticket pads and No. 2 pencils gave way to the hand-held computers three years ago in Ventura County.

Searching for ways to reduce paperwork delays and the cost of plugging information into the courthouse computer system, the Municipal Court embarked on a pilot program with the Ventura-area office of the CHP.

Many CHP officers embraced the automated system, which decreases the time that it takes to issue a citation and spits out two paper copies of the ticket, one for the driver to keep and one the driver must sign for the court file.

At shift’s end, officers plug the tiny computer into the department computer, which downloads the information from as many as 818 traffic citations to the Municipal Court computer system.

“It’s a great concept,” said Sgt. Don Hatch. “As a rule, they work very well.”

Based on the success of the pilot project, the county Board of Supervisors in March agreed to buy 15 of the devices for sheriff’s deputies in Thousand Oaks, Camarillo and Moorpark.

But Margie Borjon-Miller, systems manager for the county courts, said sheriff’s officials recently decided that the system wouldn’t work well spread out over the three cities.

That’s when Oxnard was asked to participate. As the largest issuer of traffic tickets in the county, that police department was a logical choice, Borjon-Miller said.

“We hope to have them up and running and issuing tickets by June or July,” Borjon-Miller said.

During traffic stops, Oxnard police officers will input information about the drivers and their violations by typing it on a key pad. In the case of newer California licenses that have magnetic strips, officers will be able to slide the license through a data slot to automatically input the driver’s name, address and license number.

Now, traffic tickets are written by hand and then entered into a computer at the police department.

The citations are then hand-delivered to the courthouse, where a county employee enters the same information into the courthouse computer system.

The automated system cuts out those time-consuming steps.

“It just makes for a much more efficient process,” Borjon-Miller said.

Radix Corp. of Salt Lake City designed the devices to aid utility meter readers on their rounds, and it has watched the technology spread to other uses.

Marketing Manager Steve Horrocks said the automated system has spawned a new spirit of cooperation between law enforcement agencies and county courts.

“Traditionally there has been a pretty hard line drawn between some of these agencies,” Horrocks said. “What we always get excited about is when we see somebody like the Oxnard Police Department and the Ventura County court system working together. In some instances that’s a very rare thing to find.”