Sergeant Lynn Steckelberg installs one of the new Toughboy computers into a Plymouth County Sheriff's Office vehicle. Soon four vehicles will be equipped with the computers that can handle electronic traffic citations and accident reports, able to connect with a statewide system. [Click to enlarge]

When you hand over your driver's license to the sheriff's deputy that pulled you over for an OWI, he won't have to spend much time copying down all your information.

All he'll have to do is swipe the barcode on the back.

Within a day, that violation will show up if any officer in the state types in your name.

"If you're in Waterloo tomorrow night -- boom -- it shows up that you were arrested last night," said Sergeant Lynn Steckelberg of the Plymouth County Sheriff's Office.

Meet the "Toughbooks."

These are the four computers the Plymouth County Sheriff's Office bought to use in their vehicles, thanks to a $10,000 grant from the Iowa Department of Transportation. The sheriff's office matched the grant 50-50.

The computers will allow the sheriff's crew to issue electronically filed traffic citations and create accident reports while never having to leave the scene.

With a scanner and printer right in the car, they can whip out a paper copy of the accident report for the drivers involved.

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These are no ordinary computers. Dubbed "Toughbooks" by their maker, Panasonic, they are extremely durable.

"These babies are built," Steckelberg said. "The company that makes them was experimenting with them, and they put them on top of their car and drove away."

The case got scuffed up a bit, he said, but other than that, they were completely fine.

In-vehicle computers aren't new to the law enforcement scene. The Le Mars Police Department has had in-car computers for about eight years, Steckelberg said.

"They're way ahead of the game," he said.

The computer program TraCS (Traffic and Criminal Software) was created in Iowa and is used across the board by law enforcement agencies.

"State troopers are using the same software as we are. It's putting us all on the same page so we can do our job better," Steckelberg said. "Officers in New York are all using this system. It's in 18 states and two provinces in Canada."

The aim, he said, is to try to get everyone on a uniform way of doing the paperwork side of law enforcement -- minus a lot of the paper.

"Some of the things we'll be able to send directly to people like the county attorney, which will take out having to shuttle paperwork," Steckelberg said.

The sheriff's department hopes to tie in the car computer systems with their office database.

"That way, if I happen to be in Akron, I can get on the same database we have here at the office and get information on someone, and I don't have to stop and make phone calls," Steckelberg said.

The cars themselves are not equipped with stand-alone wireless internet. To do that, Steckelberg explained, would be a huge and costly project.

"We'd need to put up special towers throughout the county," he said. "But you might see that in smaller areas, like for Le Mars."

In the future, Steckelberg said, they hope to snag more grant dollars to buy computers for the rest of the sheriff's fleet of ten vehicles.

"To set one vehicle up, it costs from $6,000 to $7,000 once you figure in the computer, docking setup, scanner and printer," said Steckelberg, who is coordinating the vehicle computer project for the county. "One of the only ways agencies like ours can obtain some of this stuff with all the budget crunches is finding different grants."