By Gene J. Koprowski, United Press International
CHICAGO (UPI) -- A parking cop approaches a BMW 318i at a meter that expired just five minutes ago. She takes a handheld computer, connected to a wireless-fidelity network, and scans the bar code on the car’s registration sticker. The ownership information is captured instantly and the cop sends transmits an electronic version of the form to a mobile printer attached to her belt, also via the WiFi connection.
The officer leaves the summons under the car’s windshield wiper, like cops usually do, then downloads the collected data later, when she is back at the station, on the city’s computer network, which starts the clock ticking for the car’s owner to return the summons within the allowed time.
The scene is being repeated at major cities around the country, including New York, where police are reducing errors in the tickets they write and increasing the amount that they collect in fines, through wireless computer networks.
“The movement for WiFi is getting stronger,” Roger Herman, a business futurist, told United Press International. “Governments are going to rely on it to completely change the way they do business.”
Last year, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a former technology entrepreneur, noted publicly that old-fashioned ticket-writing procedures were no longer acceptable, because they quite often resulted in the wrong driver being accused, thereby leaving fines due the city uncollected.
“Many cities have experienced problems with the collection of tickets that were issued,” Brian Lehmann, senior director of global government solutions at Symbol Technologies Inc., a handheld computer maker in the New York suburbs, told UPI. “There were all sorts of errors, including the inability to recognize handwriting. When the handwriting was recognized, other errors happened, like keystroke errors, when the clerks entered the ticket information into the computer.”
So last fall, the city debuted a pilot project, in the borough of Queens, outfitting 1,500 cops with WiFi-enabled mobile devices, like the one in the scenario outlined above. Since then, ticket-writing errors have been reduced dramatically in the pilot area -- to just 1 percent of tickets issued, from 39 percent before the new system was tested, Lehmann said.
“They’re not actually issuing more tickets, but they are collecting on more tickets that were issued,” he said. “The outcome is increased revenue for the city -- $40 million in new money for the NYPD.”
In the year before the launch of the WiFi project, the New York City Finance Department collected $429 million in traffic fines. However, revenue generation is not the only benefit municipalities can gain from using WiFi -- compliance with the law can be improved as well.
“There is a huge increase in the demand for portable data storage, especially secure portable data storage,” Mike Kieran, director of sales and marketing at Memory Experts International, in Montreal, told UPI.
In Los Angeles, cops are using handheld computers to note the demographic data of those they stop for traffic violations, ensuring they are not targeting blacks, Hispanics or other minorities disproportionately, thereby honoring a consent decree reached with the U.S. Department of Justice, Lehmann explained.
“This is deploying as we speak,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I met with someone yesterday and heard a report about the installation of this technology in five precincts there.”
Wireless technologies also are being used for serious crime-fighting applications, like something out of the popular TV anti-terrorism show, “24,” starring Kiefer Sutherland.
“Cops have a lot of cool applications now, combining wireless technology with personal digital assistants (PDAs),” said Charles Kriete, a mobile wireless systems engineer in the Chicago office of CDW Government, a unit of CDW, the computer reseller. “They’re sending suspect photos over the networks to PDAs,” he told UPI. “They’re taking fingerprints in the field, and sending them for verification. The technology hasn’t completely taken over the market, but it is on the upswing.”
Efficiency is not the only reason for this. Speed in finding possible suspects in the war on terror also is driving the adoption of the technologies.
“A lot of jurisdictions simply have not had compatible equipment that would allow them to communicate,” Bruce Barney, director of technical operations at the Capital Wireless Integrated Network, a governmental consortium in Greenbelt, Md., told UPI. “In a crisis, it could be a royal mess.”
Feds are partial to Blackberry wireless devices, Kriete said. But local law enforcement officers sometimes like an array of “blended” technologies, combining WiFi, cellular technologies and old-fashioned radio systems, which are, to be sure, gradually being phased out.
The reason for the slow rollout is WiFi’s limited range, usually within only a 1,000 foot to 1,500 foot range of a network hub.
“WiFi is very good, and typically does not require a line-of-sight to be effective,” said Kriete. “But for WiFi to work throughout a whole town, the police would have to set up hundreds of bridges. We’re not there yet.”
Some police departments are very technology savvy, however, and are creating WiFi “hotspots” at public buildings, such as libraries, where cops can pull into the parking lot and download, or upload, data. “They wait to transmit until they can get a good connection,” he said.
The cost of outfitting cops with WiFi-enabled computers is not cheap. Lehmann said the New York City project cost taxpayers some $3000 to $4000 per computer deployed in the field.
In the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, police in Virginia, Maryland and the city are collaborating with the University of Maryland to pool resources and develop solutions, Barney said.
Experts think the use of technology for issuing traffic tickets to motorists might even improve the image of police departments that have been tarnished by racial incidents, such as the 1991 Rodney King beating in Los Angeles and a fatal clubbing in Cincinnati last year.
The reasoning is if police can make the traffic stop -- the most common encounters respectable citizens have with cops -- run more smoothly, public perception of police departments will improve.
“The idea is to treat the citizen more like a customer,” Bob Crigler, an account executive for state and local markets at GTSI, Corp., a technology firm in Chantilly, Va., told UPI. “The analogy is that the traffic stop is like being in line at the store -- if you can get the line to move more quickly, everyone is happy.”