Police Electronic Citation Mobile System for Statewide Deployment in Oklahoma

Abstract

Collecting timely and accurate data for traffic citations and accident reports are important goals for law enforcement. Manually filled paper forms have historically contained content errors, took longer time to complete, and involved longer delay points to reflect in the records management system. Electronic citation systems were first introduced in the year 2000 where police officers used computers to fill digital citation forms, print out traffic tickets on-site, and send digital copies of the records to courts via wireless networks. To date, electronic citations systems have seen limited deployments in the State of Oklahoma. Law enforcement officials have estimated that approximately 80% of the 481 police agencies in the state are still using the paper and pen method to issue traffic citations due to financial reasons. In this thesis, I collaborated with another developer at the University of Oklahoma Center for Intelligent Transportation Systems (CITS) lab to develop a smartphone-based electronic citation system to help Oklahoma police agencies that still use the paper and pen method to issue electronic traffic citations. The proposed system is significantly cheaper than other computer-based electronic citation systems that are currently present. The developed software can be installed on most of the commercially available Android smartphones to collect accurate and reliable traffic citation data, print legible tickets on-site, and send reports to headquarters. Ideally, it can take less than a minute to complete a traffic citation using the proposed system.