On December 8, JTAC made its final 2009 presentation to the monthly stakeholders meeting held at our office in Indianapolis. The presentation highlights the milestones in court technology that have been achieved this year, including the continuing implementation of the Odyssey case management system in the counties as well as enhancements to the software application, and advances related to JTAC’s many other technology projects.
In compliance with Public Law 130-2009, JTAC has published the E-ticket Protocol. Although no funding was provided by the legislature for this project, JTAC has used existing resources to develop a standard protocol for other case management systems (court or prosecutor) to interface with the JTAC Electronic Citation and Warning System (eCWS).
Work on the E-ticket Protocol has been completed. In addition to filing over 70,000 tickets into Odyssey, the Supreme Court’s statewide case management system, JTAC has worked with vendors and courts to develop an interface to the eCWS Central Repository – the data repository that stores all electronic tickets and warnings written using eCWS software.
In September, 2009, JTAC completed the interface to CourtView (case management system used in Lake County) and Keystone (case management system used in Pendleton Town Court) and over 10,000 tickets have been electronically filed into these case management systems. Since Keystone is used by the many of City and Town Courts in Indiana, it is our understanding that this e-filing functionality is now being deployed to the rest of the courts using the Keystone system.
JTAC anticipates that other counties using CourtView including Boone, Tippecanoe, and Vanderburgh Counties, will be e-filing tickets early next year.
We will, of course, comply with the legislation’s stipulation that any E-ticket interface in each county be at “the option of the prosecuting attorney.”
The prototype to interface with the eCWS Central Repository is available at: courts.IN.gov/jtac/specs.
JTAC’s award-winning electronic citation and warning system has hit another milestone: 5,000 active users.
What this means is that 5,000 law enforcement officers are using eCWS and are saving thousands of minutes and dollars every day. Of the 5,000 active users, about 1,600 are with state agencies like the Indiana State Police, Indiana State Excise Police and Indiana Gaming Commission. The remaining 3,400 users are spread throughout the state in agencies as large as the Allen County Sheriff’s Department and as small as the Ossian Police Department in rural Wells County.
JTAC has been able to provide the e-ticket software and training free of charge. In addition, JTAC and the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute have provided scanners and printers to law enforcement agencies to use in conjunction with the e-ticket application. All of this has been accomplished through federal grant funding acquired by both JTAC and the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute.
Another milestone with the eCWS application: JTAC was contacted by 4 Lake County Courts requesting an interface with their current record management system (Courtview), and by the Pendleton Town Court and Fremont Town Court that use Keystone as their record management system requesting an interface to eCWS. JTAC and these courts have completed these interfaces. The interface allows JTAC to electronically file e-ticket infraction cases to these courts. To date, JTAC has electronically filed over 7,700 infraction cases to the Lake County Courts, over 1,800 to the Fremont Town Court and over 1,700 to the Pendleton Town Court.
Left to right: Megan LaMade (Traffic Safety Research Associate), Jeanette Bennett (Law Enforcement Liaison), Sebastian, Mary DePrez (JTAC), Ryan Klitsch, and Phil Oliver (Law Enforcement Liaison)
Earlier this week, JTAC Director Mary DePrez traveled to Savannah, Georgia for the 2009 Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) conference. At the conference, JTAC was awarded the prestigious Peter K. O’Rourke Special Achievement Award for our development of eCWS, data sharing abilities with Odyssey, the BMV and JTAC’s strong partnership with the Indiana Traffic Records Coordinating Committee and the Indiana State Police. The Peter K. O’Rourke Special Achievement Awards recognize notable achievements in the field of highway safety.
JTAC’s successful development of eCWS and subsequent capability to share information with the Odyssey CMS have resulted in amazing time savings. In 2008, 676,540 tickets or warnings were issued with eCWS. eCWS alone has saved police officers over 6 million minutes, or more than 101,000 hours of valuable time.
The GHSA recognized JTAC and the Indiana Supreme Court stating in part, “Despite the critical need for data, too often traffic records programs are not given an appropriate level of focus or funding…[JTAC's] implementation of an electronic ticket system is a model for other states considering such an upgrade.”
Earlier this week, JTAC Directory Mary DePrez traveled to Madison in Jefferson County to deliver a project update to those in attendance.
Last Tuesday, JTAC held the August Stakeholder meeting. Representatives from the Department of Corrections, Indiana Criminal Justice Institute, the Indiana Judicial Center and Judge Jeff Dywan, Lake County, were in attendance.
Mary DePrez provided an update on the ‘Public Access’ pilot for the Protection Order Registry and recent grant awards. She also mentioned two recent awards: A ‘First Place’ Best Practices Award by the Association of Transportation Safety Information Professionals; and the Peter K. O’Rourke Special Achievement Award for JTAC’s positive impact on traffic safety. Both awards were a result of the successful partnership with Tyler Technologies, Inc., the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute, the Indiana State Police, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and numerous judges, clerks and local law enforcement agencies for working together to make the eCWS/Odyssey/BMV data exchange model a nationally recognized model.
Donna Edgar gave an Odyssey deployment update. Since the July Stakeholder meeting, Owen County and 4 Superior Courts in St. Joseph County started to use Odyssey. Donna also ‘unveiled’ the Odyssey Supervision module that has been under development since last Fall. The application is undergoing rigorous testing and should be ready to deploy in the coming months. Dylan Vester also demonstrated the latest eCWS release for the handheld devices. The eCWS team is expected to begin testing next week and deployment of this release will begin in early September.
The meeting concluded promptly at 4:00! Contact Mary Kronoshek at 317-234-2710 or mkronoshek@jtac.in.gov if you would like to receive a reminder for the monthly Stakeholder meeting.
The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department is the state’s largest and busiest police force and account for a large percentage of traffic tickets issued in Marion County. IMPD issues all of their citations in an application called Z-Client. In order to aggregate Z-Client-issued citations into the eCWS Central Repository, which interfaces with other state agencies like the BMV, work has to be done to eCWS to successfully pull data out of Z-Client.
A meeting with IMPD representatives was held two weeks ago to discuss their deployment onto eCWS. Significant progress is being made with respect to the needed interfaces between the Z-Client repository and the eCWS repository. JTAC Developer Dylan Vester is working with IMPD to help update JTAC’s eCWS software and assist IMPD.
JTAC’s electronic Citation and Warning System (eCWS) has won awards and honors in the past from Cygnus and the Center for Digital Government. Now, eCWS has been recognized at the Forum on Traffic Records and Highway Safety Information Systems.
Dave Steward, JTAC’s field support specialist and all around eCWS guru, traveled to Phoenix this week to receive the ‘Best Practices’ award on behalf of JTAC at their annual conference. The ‘best practices’ submission highlighted e-tickets, filed electronically into the Indiana Supreme Court case management system called Odyssey and the electronic submission of court information from Odyssey to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
Dave is pictured here left-to-right with Nils King of the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute, Dave Steward of JTAC, ATSIP President R. Robert Rasmussen II and Martha Florey, ATSIP Second Vice President of the Wisconsin Office of Highway Safety.
The Indiana Criminal Justice Institute and the Indiana State Police are major partners with JTAC, making the electronic ticket a reality for Indiana law enforcement agencies. Last Friday, the Statewide Governing Board of the Judicial Technology and Automation Committee saluted all the staff at JTAC for this accomplishment!
Washington County judges Frank Newkirk, Jr. and Robert Bennett along with Clerk Shirley Batt have a new tool at their disposal for managing caseloads. JTAC’s Odyssey CMS went live in Washington County yesterday morning.
Washington County had no existing system for managing case records prior to Odyssey and is the seventh county in the state to begin using Odyssey. Floyd County, directly south of Washington County, was the first county in the southern half of the state to use Odyssey.
In addition to rolling out Odyssey, JTAC staff will arrive in the Washington County Prosecutor’s office today to train local staff how to use eCWS for approving e-Tickets for filing, making them the third prosecutor’s office in the state to pilot this new system.
JTAC Staffer David Steward (left) meets with Sgt. Falkinson (right). Falkinson was directing a question to JTAC Staffer Farrah Hoffman (not pictured).
Our electronic Citation & Warning System (eCWS) is getting a lot of great attention regionally in places like South Bend, LaPorte, Lafayette, Chicago Land and now eCWS is getting noticed internationally, too. On Wednesday, Sgt. Blair Falkinson of the Toronto Police Service flew from Canada to Indianapolis to see JTAC’s full-service eCWS system in action.
Blair saw the system work from the moment a ticket is written and how it’s submitted to the prosecutor, court, and to the BMV. He is interested in getting the software from JTAC for customization and then deployment in Toronto.
Blair will return to Canada with his findings to begin the process of a feasibility study. We showed the eCWS application on a laptop and on the mobile handheld device, the prosecutor screen of the eCWS Central Repository, the Odyssey CMS, and the INCite BMV application.
The Toronto Police Service has approximately 5,700 uniformed officers and 2,500 civilian employees.
Subscribe to receive updates from this site by email or by RSS feed - visit our Subscription Options page.
The JTAC Help Desk is trained to answer questions about any of the JTAC programs and applications, including Odyssey.
The help desk is operational and staff is available on Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM EST daily.
The help desk staff can also answer questions regarding INcite, the Protective Order Registry, the Online Marriage License program and all other JTAC applications. Please use the phone number and email information below to contact the JTAC help desk.