March 12, 2014

By Thomas Zimmer

As the semester draws to a close, students can expect to see a new addition to Police Services on campus.

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation recently awarded the university with a $10,490 grant that will help pay for a new reporting system to be installed in all university-owned police vehicles.

The Traffic and Criminal Software, or TRaCS, will allow officers to scan driver’s licenses and print out citations directly from their cars, said Chief of Police Matt Kiederlen.

“We can scan the driver’s license and avoid calling it in to get it checked,” Kiederlen said. “It allows us to transfer that information to any citation or traffic accident report, all within the computer.”

Kiederlen said the officers can then quickly print out a citation or report which will greatly reduce the amount of paperwork and time the process currently takes.

The grant will help pay for the equipment and installation costs that are necessary to put the system into effect, and students should expect to see it in place by May.

The benefits of the grant far outwiegh the potenial costs, Kiederlen said.

“In reducing the amount of paperwork, you increase efficiency, which reduces overall cost, and when you look at what it takes us to process a simple traffic citation, it actually adds up very quickly,” Kiederlen said. “If you are unfortunately pulled over, it would streamline the process that can sometimes be kind of painful, so that’s really our goal.”

Officer Steve Hanekamp of  university Police Services brought attention to the grant, and when he heard about it, Kiederlen signed off to apply for it immediately.

“If you have the capability to get something you want at free or very low cost, to not go for it would be pretty irresponsible on my part,” Kiederlen said. “The grant just came out, and when that happened we knew we had to go for it.”

Hanekamp said he heard about the grant from The Department of Transportation (DOT). and instantly made that a priority for campus police.

“Since we have a small department that has a small budget, if we can get the money to pay for this system that we don’t have to budget for, then that’s great,” Hanekamp said. “I talked to the (DOT) and we were awarded the grant to pay for all the equipment.”

The State of Wisconsin is requiring all Departments to Implement this system by May, and it would be expensive to replace all of the current police computers since most of them still use Windows Vista software that even the university computers have moved on from.

“It allows us to submit information to the (DOT) and to the court system all electronically,” Hanekamp said. “There’s a lot less paperwork involved and a lot less footsteps as far as us hand delivering this information to various departments, so it should really streamline the process.”

Carly Herrick, a sophomore at UW-Whitewater, said she thinks the system will be an overall good thing, but it does make her a bit nervous at the same time.

“I think that implementing this system would be convenient to the police because it would allow them to get out there and write more tickets,” Herrick said. “It would lead me to think about making wiser decisions knowing it is a lot easier to get a ticket on campus with this system in place.”

As far as concerns about an increase in tickets for students, Hanekamp said students won’t see too much of a direct effect.

“Students won’t see a huge difference, except in the fact that citations may look a bit different,” Hanekamp said. “They won’t see the carbon-copy pages, and everything will be printed out directly from the squad car.”

Hanekamp already has implemented the system in his own squad car and has begun training other officers to use it.