Collecting complete information on how many times police are using force in Wisconsin is off to a slower start, a year into the initiative. Last year, the Wisconsin Department of Justice used federal funding to start collecting data on use of force policing incidents that ended in death, severe injury, or shooting in the general direction of a person.
21 states are collecting this data already, according to a review from the National Conference of State Legislatures.
A fraction of Wisconsin’s law enforcement agencies opted in last year. Records provided to News 3 Investigates list 28 incidents reported by 22 different agencies. Key incidents are missing, perhaps most notably the Kenosha shooting of Jacob Blake that sparked nationwide protests after an officer shot a Black man seven times in the back. Other deaths are missing as well, including another in Wausau where police shot and killed Jack Bolinger.
In a statement, the DOJ said the list is incomplete because they are still working with agencies to start reporting their data.
“The data provided is not a full accounting of every use of force incident in the state because not all law enforcement agencies have adopted this new data reporting effort,” a spokesperson wrote.
Nine of the incidents are deaths resulting from force; four are “arrest-related deaths” which the department defines as any death that happens while someone is in the arrested custody of police or in the process of being detained or arrested. But police killed 19 people in Wisconsin last year, according to the independent Mapping Police Violence tracker, which draws on state and federal data to maintain a database of police killings nationwide.
Some agencies like Madison Police Department, which is reporting to the DOJ in 2021 but didn’t opt in last year because they were already reporting their data to the federal government, already track far more data than the state or federal government requires.
MPD regularly publishes the numbers associated with any kind of force used by their officers, a higher standard than the federal requirements for deadly force or great bodily harm.
The DOJ’s Division of Criminal Investigation already tracks some shootings and other “critical incidents” that include officers. The goal of this collection was to expand that database to other types of force incidents as well.
Funding barriers
Recent recommendations from the racial disparities task force would significantly expand what force data the DOJ is required to collect, should the recommendations be turned into bills that then pass the legislature and the governor’s desk.
But that would require additional funding from the state, the DOJ said, since the current use of force tracking is funded by a federal grant and the recommendations would expand the collection beyond what the federal government allows for those dollars.
“Much of the staff time in DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Information & Analysis is funded by federal grant funding,” a spokesperson wrote. “Federal funding rules do not allow federally funded staff time to be used for projects other than what the federal funding is provided for.”
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