With a rising pile of traffic summons each month, court staffing shortages and the ever-present potential for human error, Fairfax County may soon adopt an “e-summons” system that would allow police officers to directly scan driver information during traffic stops.
Officials in the Police Department and General District court said the program would not only speed the course of a traffic summons through layers of screening and data entry, but would eliminate handwriting and spelling errors that bedevil motorists and court staff alike.
Such errors are time consuming, said Deputy Chief of Police Lt. Col. Steve Sellers.
“If we can help speed that up or automate that in some sort of system, it could end up helping the police officer in the street more quickly and efficiently do the job,” he said.
The program would replace paper and pen with a handheld device that can scan license information.
That information would then be automatically transferred into the county court data base.
The county already uses the system to handle parking violations, Sellers said.
The system would greatly aid the Fairfax County General District Court, which has 36 staff positions to process between 20,000 to 25,000 summonses each month, said Clerk Nancy Lake.
“We’re in kind of a spiral here … we can’t get to the phones because we’re trying to enter the case and people keep calling because they’re cases aren’t entered,” she said. “An e-summons would be entered within two days.”
A single misspelled name can have ripple effects, she said.
If a single letter is off, motorists will be unable to find their name in the database and can’t prepay, which results in more people coming into court.
