Virtual Chalking Explanation
What is E-Chalking (Virtual Chalking) in OPS-COM?
- Virtual chalking, or e-chalking is an electronic process that mirrors how an officer would manually chalk a vehicle's tire, in order to see how long they have been parked.
- Virtual chalking creates a Time-Stamped image, of both the license plate & the entire car, in order to track how long they've been parked
- Virtual chalking provides an image that can be attached to the violation and is acceptable in a court-of-law, provided the date/time stamp is visible & clear. The chalked image is part of the violation, unless the patrol officer deletes the image.
- When LPR software is capturing plates, officers can simply click "Virtual Chalk" to create/save the image
Why "Chalk" a Vehicle?
There are some situations where chalking is very useful, for example; If a vehicle is parked and the owner is going to purchase a permit, there can be a grace period to allow the client to obtain the permit and return to the vehicle to display the permit. Alternately, in areas where parking is provided on a timed basis where a vehicle can park free for 2 hours, the officer can virtually chalk the vehicle on a first pass earlier in the day and then be able to check the vehicle later in the day to determine if it has been parked longer than the permitted time frame.
Chalking vehicles manually is time consuming, so being able to virtually-chalk vehicles makes a time-efficient solution for a necessary aspect of parking management.
Chalk records stored with a violation help when dealing with Appeals as a time-stamped image is available as "proof" of the infraction.
For a guide on how to "Chalk" a vehicle on the handhelds, click here
NOTE:
Chalking can be done in a couple of ways. If you are photographing the plate to read it through character recognition the system automatically captures a close up image of the plate as well as a contextual image of the full back of the vehicle. Both are time stamped.
If you enter in a plate via text or voice when chalking you will want to take a contextual image so that you record the time stamp.
The same is true when you actually capture the plate a second time and then issue a violation. It's advisable to take a couple images at least, plus you have the time on the ticket that the violation was written so using both methods (timestamp and time on printed ticket) you can calculate the time the vehicle was parked. There is no limit as to how many images you can take.