Fighting Racial Profiling with the Pocket PC

Montgomery County Department of Police (MCPD), as part of an agreement with it, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) and the Department of Justice, has begun to collect data on all police traffic stops in an effort to monitor stops by race, gender, location and type of stop. The data collection is part of an ongoing effort to insure that racial profiling in traffic stops has not and does not occur.

Collecting the data on paper would be time consuming and costly, so MCPD decided to implement a totally electronic solution. All patrol vehicles had two-way radios, but they lacked mobile data capability. MCPD surveyed available options and decided that the most cost-effective, efficient and accurate method was to use handheld computers to collect the data, and then download it via existing LAN/WAN connections to a central database.

Selected Aero 1550 Pocket PC

The Windows CE operating system was selected over the Palm operating system because of its greater flexibility in developing sophisticated applications that can interface with existing desktop applications. The Pocket PC platform (Windows CE) also offered equipment with significantly greater memory that the Palms, needed to store data prior to download. MCPD selected the Compaq Aero 1550 as the best handheld solution. Its backlit monochrome screen is readable, but conserves battery power. In addition, it has 16 Mb of internal memory to run programs and store data. The Aero 1550 also has a Type I CompactFlash slot that lets us use a standard Compact Card LAN adapter to connect to the MCPD network and download data on traffic stops.

Collecting the traffic stop data

The process starts out like it always has. The police officer pulls the driver over, fills out and has the driver sign the ticket, and gives him or her a copy of the ticket or gives the driver a verbal warning. When the driver departs, the officer pulls out the Aero 1550 and starts the Traffic Stop program (see Screen 1).

Screen 1: After the traffic stop, the officer starts the Traffic Stop program and enters the important information.

The custom program was developed for MCPD by Mobile Commerce and Computing (www.mobilecommerceandcomputing.com) and their sub-contractor, Ru-bicon Technologies (www.RubiconTechnologies.com).Screen by screen, Traffic Stop walks the officer through the process of collecting the necessary data, which includes the following information:

• Date and time
• Location (officer enters the cross streets closest to the traffic stop (see Screen 2)
• Driver information (Race, Gender, Date of Birth, County Resident (Yes or No), State of Driver's License and Tags (see Screens 3 and 4)
• Violation or reason for the stop (Speeding, Ran a Red Light, Equipment Problem, etc. (see Screen 5)
• Status of the stop (Verbal Warning, Written Warning, Arrest, etc. (see Screen 6)
• Traffic related charges filed (includes code numbers of traffic or civil citations)
• Non-traffic related charges filed (passengers not wearing seatbelts, etc.)
• Additional Information (entering case numbers and comments)