Catch a charge in Stafford? That’ll be $5. Guilty or not.

The Stafford County Board of Supervisors approved the implementation of a $5 fee to pay for the implementation of a new electronic summons system.

According to information from Stafford County, the system will save time by allowing sheriff’s deputies by logging information into the system from the field and generating a court summons on the spot, freeing up the time of data entry employees that work back at the office.

This fee will also allow the county’s sheriff’s office department to fund and maintain the system, as well as fund any extras that go with the system, such as printers and scanners, according to Stafford Sheriff’s Captain Lee Peters.

Anyone whose been charged with a crime, from a speeding violation to homicide, must pay.

Peters, after being asked by George Washington District Supervisor Tom Coen, confirmed that the sheriff’s office doesn’t consider the fee to be a tax. Those who accessed the system would be the only ones paying the fee. Virginia law allows the fee. The Virginia State Police already have such a program and fee in place, similar to what Stafford County will use.

The system would also be convenient to decrease the time it takes to settle a charge, officials said.

The information will also be uploaded to the Virginia State Police’s new Community Policing Data Collection which collects and displays data on traffic stops on the state’s Open Data Portal. The collection is a result of the passage of the Community Policing Act which was passed in 2020 and became effective on July 1.

The act mandated that all law enforcement agencies that participate in traffic stops must upload information on stops to this site. The information currently on file on the site was collected from July 2020 to June 30, 2020, and will continue to be updated with current information and reviewed to make sure the available data is not out of date.