Court System Congestion Snarls Traffic-Ticket Process

Ooops! It seems the backlog in traffic-ticket processing at Los Angeles County Municipal Court isn’t solely the fault of a vendor hired to input data into the court’s computers.

Court officials recently blamed the snafu on an outside vendor, who court administrators said had fallen weeks behind schedule in processing batches of traffic tickets handed out by half a dozen police agencies around the county. Among them were the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and California Highway Patrol (Highway 1, July 8).

An unknown number of motorists received tickets but were unable to pay them by telephone, mail or through the Internet, because the tickets weren’t logged into the court’s computer system until after the court appearance date--typically seven weeks after the ticket was written. Without a proper ticketing record, the only recourse for these people was to appear in person.

Nobody is quite sure what happened to those people. I was one of them and fortunately was able to pay my $22 fine by mail without getting into trouble. Roughly 7,000 tickets a day are handled by the court, and if every recipient had to show up in person, the lines would stretch for blocks. Is this the way the system is supposed to work?

“Dealing with a traffic ticket is often the only contact that the average person has with the criminal-justice system,” said Lawrence Wolf, a criminal defense attorney in Century City who sometimes serves as judge pro tem in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills municipal courts. “It has always been an eye-opening experience.”

U.S. Data Source, the company that enters data from the handwritten tickets into the court’s computer system, has found itself several days behind schedule, Chief Executive Martin Madden acknowledged.

The firm’s contract with the court requires it to turn around tickets in about a day and a half, Madden said, but the company fell behind schedule by five days.

That would account for less than a week of the backup. How was it that the tickets weren’t entered for seven weeks?

Madden said the entire system can become strained because sometimes police agencies sit on tickets for days or even weeks before they turn them over to the court. And nobody can figure out how long the court may hold on to tickets.

As a result, some days U.S. Data gets 5,000 tickets to process and other days it gets 13,000, Madden said. Things back up, court officials now admit.

“This is a bureaucracy just like anyplace else,” said Bernadette Duncan, head of traffic ticket administration for Los Angeles Municipal Court. “To say things are rosy-peachy 100% of the time, I am not going to go down that road. Sometimes we do have a backlog. Sometimes the vendor has a backlog.”

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Despite its own problems, the court isn’t letting anybody off the hook, Duncan said. When a recipient signs a ticket, Duncan said, he or she agrees to appear in court. The telephone, mail-in and Internet systems are just conveniences, she said.

“If you don’t sign the ticket, they’ll arrest you,” Duncan said.

The court is actually a lot nicer than it was 20 years ago, but somehow its idea of public service could use a little government reinvention. Hand-held computers for officers, like those used by the staff at car-rental agencies, would speed things up. In the meantime, though, what’s the solution?

Wolf, whose telephone number spells “innocent,” had another suggestion. Sign the ticket, but be sure to contest it. “Nobody should plead guilty to a traffic ticket,” he said.

If 7,000 motorists showed up for trial even one day, maybe those tickets would get processed a little faster.

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Ralph Vartabedian cannot answer mail personally but responds to automotive questions of general interest in this column. Write to Your Wheels, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. Via e-mail:

[email protected].