By Eileen Buckley
Buffalo, NY – All the parking tickets issued by Buffalo Police in the past couple of months have been hand written. Police officers are not equipped with the high-tech scanning machines used by employees of the Parking Violations Bureau.
There are two different versions of tickets being issued. Meter officers assigned to Parking Violations Bureau use a hand held scanner that leaves an electronically issued ticket in a bright orange envelope. City police, meanwhile, tag illegally parked cars with a hand written vanilla color traffic summons.
Parking Violations Bureau Director Len Sciolino says the hand written tickets take more time to process.
"Since they're not computer tickets, we have to scan them through an optical character recognition unit," Sciolino said. "The overzealous ticketing has increased the workload in this office."
Sciolino says there has been some discussions in the past about both parking violations and city police using the hand held scanner. He says that issue should be revisited.
Sciolino says the company that provides the scanners is paid by volume. But now with the large amount of tickets being issued, he says it could be good time for police to consider using the device.