LANCASTER, S.C. — A software issue is leading to some complications in the city of Lancaster’s record-keeping process.
According to the court administrator and officials with the Lancaster Police Department, the problem started when they switched to a new record-keeping system last summer.
“Apparently, our software system stopped communicating with the [South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles] system, and some of the citations that our officers had written, the information was not being transmitted to South Carolina DMV,” Police Chief Don Roper said.
From late 2022 into 2023, Roper said the SCDMV notified Lancaster police that the department was no longer getting the information it needed. After that, Roper said they started looking for a solution, landing on manual entry while they work to find a new system.
For months, he said, employees have worked to manually enter details on about 900 traffic tickets and misdemeanor criminal offenses dating back to the summer of 2022, adding new citations as they take place.
“So, the DMV is getting the information that they need and our court system is getting the information they need because we provide a copy of the citation to the court system,” Roper said. “We provide a copy of the citation to the violator on the scene and the officer retains a copy for the police department.”
While they say the issue hasn’t impacted the judicial process, Court Administrator and Associate Municipal Judge Cammie Heath said without these details recorded, authorities may not immediately know everything about a violator’s misdemeanor offense.
“I want everyone to be rest assured that the court is functioning as it was intended to and there’s no impact to the community at all,” Heath said in a statement. “We have information pertaining to everyone’s tickets, everyone’s court date and everyone is free to come in as they would like.”
Roper said they’ve nearly completed manually entering all the ticket information.
“What our issue is and what we’re trying to find a solution for is really just to find a way for the information to be automatically downloaded to DMV, so we don’t have to assign an employee to have to manually enter that,” Roper said.
He adds that addressing the software issue hasn’t been a big strain on resources so far, but they’re working with the city and IT professionals to find a solution that works long-term.
Contact Kayland Hagwood at khagwood@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.