Oak Ridge Today

New ORPD hardware, software package to allow officers to issue electronic citations

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Oak Ridge Police Department and Spillman Technologies

Oak Ridge Police Chief Jim Akagi, left, explains a new hardware and software suite that the City Council agreed to buy for the police department on Monday.

Note: This story was updated at 5:30 p.m.

A new roughly $500,000 hardware and software suite purchased for the Oak Ridge Police Department includes an electronic citation system that will allow officers to scan driver’s licenses with handheld units and quickly issue multiple citations.

The new system will save time because it will, among other things, automatically download information from the electronic tickets, including into the court system, officials said.

“It’s a lot quicker, a lot more effective,” Oak Ridge Police Chief Jim Akagi said during a January work session with the City Council.

Officials said the ability to issue tickets quicker could produce more revenue for the city and more effective law enforcement. They said it will also eliminate some problems with the current system, such as messy handwriting on paper tickets and the need to duplicate data entry in the police department and then again in the court system. [Read more…]

Domestic violence down; most victims female, TBI says

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Reports of domestic violence fell 3.4 percent during a three-year period from 2010 to 2012 in Tennessee, state authorities said.

Nearly 72 percent of the victims were female in cases where the gender of the victims were known, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said in a recently released study.

The TBI analyzed the state’s domestic violence crime data as reported by law enforcement agencies through the Tennessee Incident Based Reporting System, or TIBRS, program. The data showed a 0.4 percent drop in domestic violence reports from 2010 to 2011 and a 2.9 percent decrease from 2011 to 2012. [Read more…]