History of the National Model

In 1994 the Iowa Department of Transportation, working in partnership with the Iowa Department of Public Safety (DPS) and several local law enforcement agencies, initiated a program to create a PC-based crash reporting system to expedite data capture for police crash reports. In 1995 traffic citations and commercial motor vehicle inspections were added. Over time the program evolved into TraCS, an integrated system used by state and local law enforcement agencies with continuing leadership and support from the state. Participation by all levels of law enforcement (city, county and state) in the development of TraCS was essential to the success of the program.

In 1996 Iowa was selected by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) as a partner for the National Model for the Statewide Application of Data Collection and Management Technology to Improve Highway Safety Project. FHWA provided funds to share National Model/TraCS project successes with other states, and subsequently the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) also contributed funds to enhance the program’s success.

In 2000 the ILT was added to the National Model as a user-friendly tool to collect geographical information system (GIS) coordinates. Although a separate application, the ILT is launched from TraCS and the location output is stored with the report in the TraCS database and exported with the report. To take advantage of the data, including the location, and make the data immediately useable to local agencies, an Incident Mapping Tool (IMAT) was created. IMAT uses the same look and feel of the ILT for ease of use and provides law enforcement agencies with a set of queries for creating reports and the capability to create and print maps that graphically display the spatial concentration of incidents.

To simplify the transition of the TraCS solution from one state to another, the SDK was added to the TraCS Suite of Applications in November of 2000. The SDK allows other states to manage the evolution of their current paper forms into TraCS electronic forms and customize the TraCS environment to meet their individualized needs.

Today TraCS is a sophisticated data collection and reporting tool for the public safety community to streamline and automate the capture of incident data in the field and transfer the data from the local agency to a statewide enterprise system. Iowa’s TraCS package includes a component for crash reporting, citation writing, warning ticket, driving while intoxicated reporting, commercial motor vehicle inspections, field investigative reports, National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) compliant incident reporting, criminal affidavit and complaint forms, and time and activity reports. Electronic data collection also sets the stage for electronic filing with the courts in addition to populating the courts’ database with electronic data.

Inherent in the National Model/TraCS program are several key benefits. Capturing the data where it originates improves the accuracy, completeness, and timeliness of incident data and eliminates the need for duplicate entry into local and state databases; providing quantifiable benefits in reduced need for data entry resources and administrative duties, and the less-quantifiable benefit of having better data more timely for problem identification and improved decision making. At the local level TraCS provides law enforcement administrators almost immediate information. Expediting the receipt of data in a central enterprise system facilitates and supports timely business processes, including applying driver sanctions and other important public safety related management functions. Combining these advantages with the benefit of linking to federal systems provides the opportunity for higher quality data to be delivered more timely to federal data managers whose decisions impact a broader audience than just the jurisdiction submitting the data.