Western Australia Police Force officers can finally do away with their carbon copy pads and pencils and move to an electronic capability when recording traffic infringements.
In a statement, the Police Force said that since the 1970s, officers had handwritten traffic infringement notices on carbonated P140 General Infringement Notice books.
“After issuing an infringement at the roadside, officers had to further submit a copy once they returned to the base, so it could be manually uploaded to a central infringement processing system,” the Police said.
“Currently this occurs for up to 180,000 handwritten traffic infringement notices per year,” it said.
“Now officers can use the electronic traffic infringement application on their personal mobile devices.
“This will allow an officer to retrieve person and vehicle data from their mobile devices and populate the required fields on the electronic infringement notice.”
Minister for Police and Road Safety, Paul Papalia said the roll out of electronic infringements would bring Western Australia into line with other jurisdictions, including Victoria, NSW, Queensland and Tasmania, which all had electronic infringement notice capability.
“Motorists will continue to receive their infringements in the mail and will still have 28 days to pay,” Mr Papalia said.
“WA Police has been allocated more than $40 million for digital policing initiatives, including the roll out of personal mobile devices, body-worn cameras, automatic number plate recognition cameras and drones,” he said.
Mr Papalia said it was hard to imagine in this day and age that police were still using the archaic manual process of handwriting infringements.
