By JESSICA BAIR, The Suncoast News

Published: September 13, 2007

PORT RICHEY - It's a daunting task for any law enforcement officer: sitting in a patrol car and flipping through page after page of Florida laws to find the right one for a particular situation.

But John Landry, 42, a retired police lieutenant from Palm Beach County, and his partner, a narcotics agent, say they have found a way to make the statute search much easier.

Criminal Statute Identification Program software is being installed on laptops in all 10 Port Richey police cruisers. The other component of the software is the Traffic Statute Identification Program.

The Port Richey Police Department is one of two test agencies for the new technology. The other is the police in Jupiter, a town of about 50,000 in Palm Beach County.

The software isn't costing local police a thing.

'With just a few clicks, it walks officers through prompts and leads them to the proper statute and crime type, right there in plain English,' Landry said.

The program asks a series of yes or no questions to ensure the officer has the correct crime, he explained.

The software is designed to replace the thick statute book that officers carry in their patrol cars. That book was written by teams of lawyers and is often hard to interpret.

'This is a really big step for us,' police Lt. David Brown said. 'It's really exciting because we don't get too many toys here in Port Richey.'

Brown came across the software while attending the Florida Police Chiefs Association conference in June. Landry gave a demonstration, and Brown 'instantly fell in love with the program.'

'You don't want a book in your face when out on the road at 2 a.m. with the bad guy standing there,' he said.

The software package will help officers with some of the more obscure statutes they don't come across regularly.

'If they're not sure about a law, then typically they have to go to the book and take the time to find, research, and interpret it,' Brown said. 'It allows officers to be more vigilant in the field and generate the necessary reports while keeping the bad guy in their line of sight.'

Landry, who also worked for the fraud division of the Florida Department of Financial Services, got the idea while working on his doctorate in education.

'Police officers have always had difficulty coming up with the exact charge for an offense,' he said. 'So I thought: How can we address this issue?'

That was two years ago. Now his company, West Palm Beach-based Ten-8 Software Solutions, is awaiting the product's official rollout on Jan. 1.

The programs will be 'significantly less expensive' than any existing software and are about the same price as current manuals, the company's Web site says.

For more on the software, go online to www.lg-web sites.com/Sites/Ten-8Soft ware/HomePage.htm, call (561) 352-1922, fax (561) 422-4627, or e-mail info@ten-8software.com or johnmlandry@ten-8soft ware.com.