The clerk’s office, long buried in paper, historically relied on a wholly manual process where officers that wrote drivers up on patrol would take a batch of handwritten tickets back to the station and mail it to the clerk’s office. Once they arrived at the clerk, they were typed up to be entered into the court’s system.
That process meant it took sometimes a week or more for that information to make it into the system. Drivers anxious to pay their tickets right away were unable to because clerks couldn’t yet match their payment with violations. At times, violators would mail in checks and clerks would have to try to track down their citation later, Spyropoulos said.
Under the new e-citation pilot, citation information is directly submitted on a tablet or computer in an officer’s car and that can be auto-populated with information from their driver’s license or registration. That information is sent electronically back to the police station for review, then sent on to the court clerk. That auto-population can halve the time it takes officers to write a ticket and cut transfer time from officers to the clerk down to a day or two.
The accuracy is an added bonus, Spyropoulos told the Tribune in an interview at the Daley Center, “because then our clerks don’t need to look at handwriting, try to decipher what’s on there, oftentimes there’s not an opportunity to verify, ‘Is this an R? Is this a P? You know, what is this handwriting?”
She said the effort had been talked about for at least a decade and she was happy they could make it happen within a year of her taking office. The change required the clerk’s internal system to link up with each municipality’s software, and for beat officers to be able to print tickets instead of tearing them off a handheld sheet. They’ve been working out kinks since early December.
About 40 municipalities and the Cook County sheriff’s office have taken e-citation up, and the office expects to add another 20 by the end of March. The list doesn’t include the Chicago Police Department yet, but Spyropoulos said talks have started.
The court clerk is already receiving about 1,200 e-citations a day for minor moving violations like failure to stop at a stop sign, wear a seat belt, have a valid license or registration, speeding (over the limit but under 25 mph) and speeding in school or construction zones.
Ticket payment options won’t change: They can still be submitted online, by mail or in person. As for future modernization efforts, Spyropoulos said she hopes to make online payment smoother. She’s also hoping to let violators sign up for traffic school, make pleas and submit certification documents online.
“People deal with family, school, work obligations every day. It shouldn’t be the lack of modernization of this office that causes any kind of aggravation on their part. We should just be able to streamline it. An maybe the fact that they got a ticket should be the aggravation, sure, but not the way that we handle it in the office,” Spyropoulos said.
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