U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for Wisconsin governor, has not supported defunding the police — an effort to reduce law enforcement funding by shifting it to other programs.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the Democratic nominee, claimed Tiffany voted six times to defund the police.
None of those House votes would have taken money away from law enforcement.
Tiffany voted against a bill that would have directly funded local police departments.
Other measures he opposed were different, including:
Funding more than a dozen federal agencies, including NASA and the Commerce and Justice departments.
Health and Human Services grants for violence intervention programs.
Grants for mental health professionals, rather than law enforcement, to respond to certain emergencies.
We found no evidence that Tiffany backed reducing police funding.
In 2022, Tiffany said “it’s time to stop the defund the police movement.” In 2026 he criticized the movement.
This Fact Brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Members of Milwaukee’s Community Collaborative Commission are looking to Baltimore as they work to give residents a greater voice in how policing is carried out in Milwaukee.
Community policing, a core focus of the commission’s work, calls for police and residents to work together to identify and respond to neighborhood problems.
Baltimore’s “Community Policing Plan” spells out who is responsible for that work, what it involves and how it can be put into practice.
“What works in Baltimore may or may not work in similar ways here,” said Tim Baack, president and CEO of Pathfinders, an organization that supports homeless and runaway children, and a member of the commission. “But there’s enough of the framework that it’s not like we have to start from scratch.”
In recent years, the commission has worked on police policy reform, community-oriented policing and oversight of other reforms. Its members include community activists and leaders of local nonprofits.
Earlier this summer, the group said it was in the late stages of completing a community policing plan for Milwaukee.
Community policing already happening, Milwaukee Police Department says
Milwaukee police officers table at the All In, All Youth, All Summer resource and employment fair in April. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
The Milwaukee Police Department says it has already implemented the framework for community policing in the city.
The department has a community-oriented policing policy and has worked with the Community Collaborative Commission to gather community input and develop a plan.
“MPD has always been a part of the conversation with the (Community Collaborative Commission)” in developing the plan, a spokesperson for the department said.
Here are four lessons from Baltimore and how they compare with what MPD is already doing.
1. Every officer is responsible for community policing
Baltimore’s plan states that “every officer is a community policing officer.”
In other words, community policing is not supposed to be limited to officers with specialized community-related duties.
“Community policing should shape everyday interactions/enforcement encounters/training and decision-making across the department,” said Bridget Whitaker, executive director of Safe & Sound and a member of the commission.
Safe & Sound is an organization that works to unite residents, youths and law enforcement.
MPD has an official policy that requires all department members to engage in community and problem-oriented policing daily.
The department is “committed to the principle that community policing is the responsibility of every officer,” a spokesperson for MPD said.
However, the Fire and Police Commission has questioned how fully that principle has been put into practice.
In a January memo to the Milwaukee Board of Fire and Police Commissioners and MPD command staff, the Fire and Police Commission argued that MPD relies too heavily on command staff and specialized community liaison officers for community engagement.
2. There’s a difference between engagement and being present
Baltimore’s plan distinguishes police simply being visible in a neighborhood from engaging with the people who live there. Officers are expected to have informal conversations with residents to help build relationships.
“Presence matters, but meaningful engagement requires interaction, listening, relationship building and collaboration,” Whitaker said.
MPD’s 2025 review similarly says community events alone do not amount to community-oriented policing.
However, the review says such events can still contribute to community policing by allowing residents and police to exchange information and develop solutions together.
The Fire and Police Commission memo makes a distinction between community involvement and collaboration.
With involvement, police largely identify problems and decide what to do. With collaboration, residents help identify problems, shape responses and determine whether they worked.
MPD says residents already participate in that process through district crime and safety meetings, community partnership units, community organizations and various other forums.
Ralikh Hayes, deputy director and co-founder of Baltimore-based Organizing Black, a grassroots civil rights and advocacy group, said his city’s residents still lack a formal way to ensure their input influences what the city actually does.
“There’s no formal mechanism of ‘we want this specifically,’ and then accountability if they see it or don’t,” Hayes said.
3. Focus on root causes
Problem-oriented policing focuses on the root causes of crime, rather than only enforcing laws or responding to individual incidents.
Baltimore uses a four-step process: identify the problem; analyze its causes; develop a response; and assess whether it worked.
MPD said it already uses the same approach, known as the SARA model.
Baack said Milwaukee will still have to adapt ideas from other cities to Milwaukee’s own circumstances.
“One thing we realized in looking at what works and sometimes what didn’t work in other communities — it’s never really an apples to apples,” he said.
Hayes said even different neighborhoods within Baltimore require different approaches.
“Baltimore is not a one-size-fits-all place,” he said. “Every neighborhood is different and has different issues.”
4. Reward officers for community policing work
Baltimore makes community policing part of how officers are evaluated, including annual performance reviews and promotions.
That stood out to Whitaker.
“Organizations ultimately demonstrate their priorities through what they measure, reward and hold people accountable for,” she said.
The Fire and Police Commission memo recommends problem-solving work should factor into performance evaluations, promotions and transfers.
Baack said the ultimate measure should be what residents think.
“The plan will be successful when the community says it’s successful,” he said.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership betweenCatchLight LocalandReport for America.
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A UW-Madison police officer received a letter of reprimand after a student journalist in April 2025 brought to light allegations of inappropriate behavior.
The behavior included late-night texts and flirtatious conversations with female students while on duty and relaying confidential police information to help students avoid consequences for underage drinking.
The internal police investigation into the officer’s behavior included no interviews with students.
Two students reported the officer’s behavior to Greek life officials in October 2024. Greek life discussed the concerns with the officer, but did not alert UWPD.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison police officer received a letter of reprimand last summer after a student journalist alerted UWPD about allegations of the officer’s inappropriate conduct with sorority and fraternity members. A follow-up Wisconsin Watch investigation has found UWPD interviewed no students as part of its internal review.
Additionally, six months before the student journalist alerted police, two former sorority executives reported the officer’s unsettling behavior to UW-Madison’s Greek life staff, who discussed the matter with the officer but did not forward the complaint to UWPD.
Wisconsin Watch first reported in July 2025 on allegations that UWPD Officer Diego Lema Hernandez had initiated late-night texting conversations, asked female students on coffee dates while on duty and relayed confidential police information to help students avoid consequences for underage drinking.
Wisconsin Watch is now naming Lema Hernandez because UWPD confirmed he received a letter of reprimand in June 2025. Lema Hernandez did not respond to requests for comment.
UWPD investigators found that Lema Hernandez failed to exercise good judgment in communicating with students about his knowledge of when Madison police would check bars for underage patrons.
Other allegations, which are fully redacted from the final report, were not sustained.
Lema Hernandez, who joined UWPD in 2017, remains a downtown community liaison officer for the department.
Student journalist prompts investigation
UWPD learned of allegations against Lema Hernandez in April 2025 from a UW-Madison student journalist, who spoke with 11 students on the condition of anonymity.
“We took these concerns and allegations very seriously and launched an internal investigation based on the information provided to us,” UWPD spokesperson Marc Lovicott said in an email.
UW-Madison Police Officer Diego Lema Hernandez received a letter of reprimand after a UWPD investigation into allegations he was sending inappropriate text messages to students. (UW-Madison)
According to the internal investigative report obtained under the state’s public records law, UWPD conducted two interviews with Lema Hernandez and a five-minute phone call with a Madison police officer. Investigators also reviewed dozens of Lema Hernandez’s text conversations and identified 70 that related to bar checks, often followed by short phone calls.
Referred to as “raids” by students, bar checks are police inspections of drinking establishments for compliance with alcohol laws, including age and capacity restrictions.
In one February 2025 example, a student texted Lema Hernandez about whether Whiskey Jacks Saloon would be checked that night and if they should leave. Lema Hernandez responded that he could call in five minutes. They spoke for about a minute, and the student later thanked him on the way home.
In other texts when asked about bar checks, Lema Hernandez responded with phrases like “likelihood is high tonight,” “nothing for tonight that I know of,” and “yesterday and tonight run a good probability.”
When questioned, Lema Hernandez told investigators that he called students to tell them he did not have information about when or where bar checks would occur — and that even if he did, he would not share it.
Throughout UWPD interviews, Lema Hernandez recognized that a lot of the text messages “look bad” when it comes to sharing information about bar checks. He also acknowledged the optics of a male officer meeting with sorority members and said he does not want to put himself or UWPD “in that position.”
An excerpt from the call log for University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Officer Diego Lema Hernandez that was reviewed as part of an internal disciplinary review. (UW-Madison Police Department)
“Better judgement should have been used in the language to convey what information you do and don’t have in several areas,” UWPD Assistant Chief Kari Sasso wrote in Lema Hernandez’s June 2025 letter of discipline. “You know you should have been more direct in your text messages sharing that you do not have information on where and when bars will be checked.”
“Your verbal and written communications must be clear to ensure there are no misunderstandings. You are a valued member of the department. You go above and beyond to be a resource for your community, providing safety tips, meeting with community members, and assuring students have a sounding board to guide them through tough situations.”
UWPD concluded its investigation before Wisconsin Watch published the student journalist’s report in July 2025. The department did not interview any of the students who made the allegations, according to the investigative report.
Lovicott said UWPD still has not received any formal complaints from any campus department or students about Lema Hernandez. He said UWPD could not interview students because the student journalist did not provide the sources’ identities. He did not respond to a question about whether police attempted to use the text message records to contact students.
“Based on the findings of our investigation, there was no new information in the article that warranted reopening the investigation,” he said in an email.
University policy unclear on reporting police complaints
After last year’s article was published, Wisconsin Watch spoke with two former student sorority executives who said they brought concerns about Lema Hernandez to staff at the UW-Madison Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life (FSL) in October 2024 — six months before UWPD learned about separate allegations from the student journalist.
Both requested anonymity because they feared potential consequences for speaking publicly about former colleagues. Neither was among the 11 anonymous sources who were interviewed for the Wisconsin Watch article.
“I really appreciate you all making a story about this, I think this officer has made so many women feel this way,” one of the women wrote to Wisconsin Watch in response to the article.
She said Lema Hernandez was openly flirtatious, calling her sweetheart in conversation and texting her late at night.
“I had gone back and forth so many times, wondering, ‘Am I overreacting? Am I in the wrong? Is this my fault?’” she said later in an interview. “It became more and more clear to me that he was creating a power dynamic and really stepping over the line of being a professional resource.”
Her friend, another sorority executive, recalled one incident when Lema Hernandez spent the entire day hanging out at the Fraternity and Sorority Life office. When arrests came up in conversation, Lema Hernandez offered to “arrest” her, she said. She agreed, thinking it was funny — but left the interaction “physically, mentally and emotionally” uncomfortable after he handcuffed her hands behind her back. Wisconsin Watch reviewed a copy of a photo of the incident.
The women reported Lema Hernandez’s behavior to FSL staff, and their concerns were escalated to director Maggie Hayes, who told them later that month that she would reach out to Lema Hernandez directly, the sorority executive said.
In an email, Hayes initially told Wisconsin Watch that the complaint was shared “with the UWPD team.” After UWPD said it was not contacted about the complaint, she clarified that the office called Lema Hernandez directly to discuss the complaint.
Two sorority members contacted University of Wisconsin-Madison Greek life officials about Diego Lema Hernandez in October 2024, six months before UWPD learned about his behavior. Greek life officials contacted Lema Hernandez about the complaint, but not UWPD. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
UW-Madison’s Office of Student Affairs said in a statement that the complaint did not meet Title IX reporting requirements for sexual harassment or rise to the level of notifying Lema Hernandez’s supervisors or UWPD.
UWPD policy creates a clear internal reporting process once a complaint reaches UWPD. UW-Madison’s university-wide reporting policies, however, do not appear to require employees to forward non-Title IX complaints about UWPD officer conduct to the department.
“The FSL team confirmed that the described behavior did not meet the criteria for mandatory staff reporting,” said Jenny Bernhardt, director of communications for the university’s Office of Student Affairs. “With the student’s consent, (FSL) addressed the general issue directly with Officer Lema Hernandez as concerns raised by a larger group of FSL student leaders.”
Bernhardt spoke on behalf of Hayes, who did not respond when asked why she initially said FSL spoke with the UWPD team. Bernhardt confirmed FSL did not further escalate the information after speaking with Lema Hernandez.
“In the FSL staff conversation with Lema Hernandez in October 2024, it was agreed that his future communications with FSL students would be related to safety, security, and event management only, conveyed through UW-Madison channels, and include FSL Office staff,” Bernhardt said.
UWPD records show Lema Hernandez communicated with students about bar checks about two dozen times between the October 2024 conversation and when UWPD launched its internal investigation in April 2025.
‘Who do you hold responsible?’
Lema Hernandez often visited sorority houses to give presentations covering campus safety, medical amnesty and behavior-based policing.
The student journalist who wrote the original Wisconsin Watch article attended one of Lema Hernandez’s sorority presentations and recorded audio in which Lema Hernandez told freshmen and sophomores, “Every now and then I might hold whatever door I’m manning open for the three or four of you to leave without any real consequences — but don’t tell my boss that. I say that because I’ve actually done it.”
UWPD investigators did not review the recording itself, but asked Lema Hernandez about the student journalist’s account of it. He told investigators he probably said something like he would “rather hold the door” but it’s not something he can or would do.
He also told investigators that part of his role as an officer is to ensure the Greek life community is following the university approval process when hosting social events at bars.
University of Wisconsin-Madison sorority houses along Langdon Street in this photo illustration on June 4, 2025, in Madison, Wis. A UW-Madison police officer, who serves as a downtown liaison community officer for an area that includes Langdon Street, is under investigation after a student journalist presented allegations the officer engaged in unsolicited text communications with students and offered to help students avoid underage drinking tickets. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Sylvia Butters, another student journalist, interviewed Lema Hernandez for a class project in February 2025. In a recording Butters provided to Wisconsin Watch, Lema Hernandez described how students would alert him about planned social events at bars, which he would relay to Madison police. He said he would then personally monitor the events and tell Madison police not to worry about checking them.
He mentioned a February 2024 fraternity event at 7 Iron Social, a since-closed sports bar on State Street. The event appears to match one where police found 106 of the 125 patrons were underage, according to an official city report on the incident.
“I (told the officers), from 9 to 11, there’s an event, it’s been checked. I will continue doing my checks. Essentially, don’t touch it until at least 11:30,” he told Butters.
Lema Hernandez told Butters that Madison police entered 7 Iron Social at 11:46 p.m. after an intoxicated individual “stumbled into a group of cops” who were planning to check a different bar. They found no one checking IDs or monitoring capacity at 7 Iron Social, he said.
“Who do you hold responsible?” Lema Hernandez told Butters. “For Officer Diego, like, y’all were good until 11:30 … Then, I have a conversation with the (fraternity), like, ‘I had you up until I couldn’t have you anymore.’”
“There’s a lot of things that I can do for people,” Lema Hernandez added. “I take, obviously, a big risk when I do it.”
Asked if Lema Hernandez was authorized to communicate with Madison police in the manner he described — including conveying when officers should or should not conduct a bar check — Lovicott said UWPD officers routinely work with Madison police.
“That is precisely what happened in this instance; information sharing helps our partners know about official events and where they’re located,” Lovicott wrote in an email. “It is purely information sharing, and has nothing to do with how MPD conducts patrols or enforcement actions.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Sheboygan’s police chief and city administrator plan to ask the common council to terminate the police department’s contract with Flock Safety during an upcoming meeting, according to an Aug. 25 statement.
The statement said the police department has been using automated license plate reader technology for over 10 years, while 15 Flock Safety cameras have been used since 2024.
“ALPR (automated license plate reader) technology and Flock-captured data have been successfully used to solve several serious criminal cases in the City,” the statement said.
Last month, the police department “became aware of actions by Flock Safety believed to be inconsistent with the terms and expectations of the City’s contract and which undermine trust in the services provided,” according to the statement.
“The Police Department confirmed the circumstances and will therefore ask the Common Council to terminate the contract,” the statement said.
Sheboygan Police Chief Kurt Zempel said the use of technology “is an important part of our effectiveness in providing justice and safety for our community.”
“But as with any system that involves access to powerful technology or sensitive information, strong internal controls and community trust are vital,” Zempel said. “That trust must extend to the partners who provide those services.”
The common council could vote to terminate the contract during a Sept. 8 meeting. Sheboygan Mayor Ryan Sorenson said public works staff have wrapped the cameras in plastic ahead of that meeting.
Sorenson said he supports the decision by the police chief and city administrator.
“Fundamentally, this is a bigger conversation that you’re seeing across the country,” Sorenson said. “And when you have powerful AI tools, we want to make sure that our community feels safe and trusted.”
Sorenson said the police chief has told him the technology has been used to help solve a few crimes.
“The crux of the decision that we’re making on this primarily comes from an erosion of trust from Flock itself and how they were using our data,” Sorenson said.
Sheboygan Ald. Susie Boorse, the common council president, said she also has concerns around the data usage related to the technology.
“I guess it boils down to the fact that we just can’t be too careful about how our data is being used,” Boorse said. “And in the end, while we obviously want public safety to be a priority, I think that we have to make those judgment calls about the way that we go about doing that, to the best of our capabilities.”
Meanwhile, Brookfield Ald. Catherine Kahler is asking the city to “review its use of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology and participation in the Flock Safety network before our current agreement automatically renews in July 2027,” according to an Aug. 26 statement.
“I think we should understand how information collected through the system can be accessed and shared, what rights the vendor has regarding that information, how the technology and its capabilities are evolving, and whether our existing safeguards and oversight are sufficient,” Kahler said in the statement. “I also think it is appropriate to consider the implications of using public funds to participate in a privately operated system of this scale.”
Letter from Milwaukee council members calls for further reforms
This week, members of the Milwaukee Common Council sent a letter to Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman and the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission, or FPC, about the use of the camera system by the police department.
It comes after the department announced changes to department access to the system and changes to its audit process this year. Those changes were made after a former Milwaukee police officer was charged with using the system to check the location of the vehicle of the person he was dating and that person’s ex.
The letter requested the commission look into more reforms related to the system and asked for a “complete history of all searches conducted by outside agencies using MPD camera data or conducted by MPD officers on behalf of outside agencies.”
It also asked that a policy be adopted to suspend access to the Flock system, “when there is credible evidence of intentional personal or unauthorized use.”
“This is an urgent moment, and a problem that will not correct itself,” the letter said.
In response to that letter, a spokesperson for the department said MPD “respects and values the concerns and positions of our elected officials.”
“We will work with the FPC to address our Council members’ concerns and respond to the Council after we have carefully reviewed their request and can provide a factual and thoughtful response,” the statement said. “The exchange of information, positions and ideas between MPD and our elected officials is important as we both serve the same community. MPD is committed to transparency and engaging in important dialogue such as this.”
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Wisconsin collects statewide data on serious police uses of force, but inconsistent reporting standards make it difficult to reliably compare departments.
Police departments differ in what they define use of force, with some tracking actions — such as dog bites, pointing firearms or vehicle maneuvers — that others do not.
One expert says inconsistent statewide standards can make agencies that report more comprehensively appear more force-prone, potentially discouraging transparency.
A Madison police officer’s fatal shooting of 38-year-old Corey Ruiz last month was the department’s first in more than five years.
Madison police officers are less likely to open fire during an arrest than officers in most similarly sized departments nationwide. But police shootings account for only a tiny fraction of all uses of force in Madison and elsewhere.
How does Madison’s broader use-of-force record compare with other departments? Inconsistent state-level data makes that question difficult to answer.
State lawmakers laid the groundwork for such comparisons in 2021 — one of many police oversight reforms enacted nationwide after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd a year earlier. Wisconsin lawmakers voted to require the state Department of Justice to catalog serious uses of force by police departments and sheriffs’ offices. The DOJ now maintains a public Use-of-Force and Arrest-Related Death database, but the underlying law leaves room for law enforcement agencies to differ in the types of force they report to the state.
The result: The data offers apples-to-oranges comparisons that make it difficult to meaningfully weigh one agency’s record against another’s.
Departments vary in rules for use-of-force tracking
Law enforcement agencies generally require officers to report uses of force to their chain of command.
Most agencies compile those records into internal datasets or annual reports, but they vary widely in the types of incidents they track.
The Green Bay Police Department, for instance, requires officers to file an after-action report if they use their police car to block, pin or strike another moving vehicle. The Milwaukee Police Department requires officers to file a similar report after conducting a “forcible blood draw.” Madison Police Department guidelines mention neither type of incident.
Types of force that require reporting, as shown in the Madison Police Department’s standard operating procedure.
Both the Madison and Milwaukee police departments, however, require officers to file after-action reports if they point their firearms at a person, regardless of whether they fire a shot. Green Bay’s department does not.
“There’s really no uniformity,” said Matt Graham, a senior data analyst with the nonprofit Center for Policing Equity.
While some states — New Jersey, for instance — have standardized use-of-force reporting rules for law enforcement, Graham said, Wisconsin’s patchwork of policies more closely resembles the national norm.
Though internal use-of-force data can’t be used to compare agencies, a single police department can still use its own data to “analyze whether any racial or other demographic disparities exist in their use of force patterns” and evaluate whether policies and training effectively limit unnecessary use of force, said Meghan Stroshine, associate director of Marquette University’s Criminal Justice Data Analytics program.
Internal Madison Police Department records show more than 2,300 uses of force between 2020 and the first quarter of 2026, sometimes listing more than one use of force for a single police encounter. Most incidents involved bodily force alone, though officers reported using Tasers 197 times and pepper spray 127 times. The department averaged roughly 185,000 annual calls per service in recent years.
The Department of Justice database is more complete than Madison’s internal records in at least one instance.
Madison use-of-force records include an entry matching the December 2024 arrest of 32-year-old Richard Johnson in a hotel parking lot. Officers tackled Johnson while investigating a reported car theft; the department’s entry describes his resulting injury as an “abrasion.” It does not note that Johnson went into cardiac arrest and died at a hospital the following day.
The Dane County medical examiner ruled the death an accident, citing Johnson’s cocaine use as the primary cause of his heart attack. Madison’s Office of the Independent Police Monitor disputed that finding in June, arguing that Johnson’s death should be treated as a homicide.
Unlike the internal Madison records, the DOJ’s database includes Johnson’s “arrest related death.”
The 2021 state law behind the DOJ’s use-of-force tracking efforts requires the agency to collect records only on incidents resulting in “great bodily harm or death” and those involving gunfire — either an officer shooting at a civilian or vice versa. A separate law requires the agency to log any cases in which a person “dies while detained, arrested, or in the course of being arrested,” even if the death isn’t a direct result of a use of force. The DOJ combines both sets of records in its database.
That dataset lists 70 arrest-related deaths between 2022 and 2025. The Rock County Sheriff’s Office reported five of those deaths, all but one of which took place in the county’s jail. Though the database doesn’t specify causes of arrest-related deaths, the sheriff’s office characterized one death as a suicide and another as an accidental drug overdose.
The DOJ’s records are far from a perfect measuring stick. The DOJ relies on law enforcement agencies to provide up-to-date reports of serious uses of force, but agencies differ in the types of force they consider serious enough to report to the state.
While the agency “works continuously with agencies to train on proper data entry and usage of the form, as well as performs incident audits,” DOJ spokesperson Riley Vetterkind wrote, “the responsibility to report accurate, up-to-date data falls on each law enforcement agency.”
“Ultimately, even when relying upon a rigid definition, human judgement is still a factor,” he added.
What is ‘great bodily harm’?
Wisconsin Statutes define “great bodily harm” as “bodily injury which creates a substantial risk of death, or which causes serious permanent disfigurement, or which causes a permanent or protracted loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ or other serious bodily injury.”
Those variations can skew the number of incidents a given department reports to the state.
Green Bay police, for instance, reported 31 serious use-of-force incidents to the DOJ between 2022 and 2025 — second only to Milwaukee’s police department, which reported 35 incidents in the same period.
Milwaukee employs roughly 1,500 sworn police officers and received over 1 million calls for service over that four-year span, compared to Green Bay’s 176 sworn officers and roughly 270,000 calls for service.
The Kenosha Police Department, with more sworn officers serving a city only slightly less populous than Green Bay, reported only five incidents.
Those figures do not include arrest-related deaths, including the February 2024 suicide of 40-year-old Steve Evaristo Ventura after a shootout with Green Bay police officers.
But Green Bay may not be as much of an outlier as it appears. All but three of the department’s use-of-force incidents in the state database involve police dog bites.
Madison’s police department has not reported any dog bites to the DOJ since 2022, though its internal records list 27 incidents involving dog bites in the past four years — most of which sent the bitten person to the emergency room. A Madison Police Department spokesperson did not respond to questions about the department’s threshold for reporting uses of force to the state.
The Milwaukee Police Department likewise reported no dog bites to the DOJ between 2022 and 2025, though the department’s own use-of-force records list nearly a dozen dog bite incidents — many of them accidental.
Green Bay Police Chief Chris Davis told Wisconsin Watch he can’t neatly explain his department’s relatively high use-of-force tally without first reviewing peer agencies’ standards for reporting to the DOJ.
“Our intention is to report everything to the state that we’re required to under the law,” he said, “because I think it’s good for the public to know.”
Most Wisconsin law enforcement agencies reported no uses of force to the DOJ. Among those that reported at least one incident, a third exclusively reported incidents in which a police officer discharged a firearm.
The mismatch in use-of-force reporting standards across departments limits the usefulness of the DOJ’s data.
“If you’re able to actually compare across departments, you could have a good idea of what reforms (or) what interventions are actually reducing use of force,” Graham said. “So far, that’s generally not possible in most places in the U.S.”
In the meantime, agencies that report a broader range of use-of-force incidents to the DOJ risk appearing more force-prone than agencies with narrower reporting standards, Stroshine said.
“Without an insider’s understanding of the data and what it represents, one could make any number of erroneous conclusions about a department, its culture, or the nature and frequency of its officers’ use of force,” Stroshine said. “As a consequence, one could argue that nonstandardization creates a disincentive for data transparency.”
The 2021 state law left some discretion for law enforcement agencies to decide which incidents to report to the state.
Some of that flexibility was intentional, said Scott Kelly, chief of staff for state Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, the bill’s prime sponsor.
“One of the things that was discussed was that different departments do record uses of force differently,” he said, “and we didn’t want to change how they dealt with it themselves.”
With law enforcement agencies already under heightened scrutiny at the time, pushing departments to standardize their use-of-force reporting could have been too much to ask, he said. “That’s for a future legislature to decide.”
Davis, the Green Bay chief, says consistent statewide reporting is an achievable goal.
“We already use the same standards for use-of-force training and policy throughout the state,” he said, “so I think it’s not too far to jump to get to the same standards for use-of-force reporting.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
When a Madison police officer fatally shot Corey Ruiz on July 22, his death sparked outrage — and questions.
Among them: Why was Ruiz killed, and what kind of training or rules could have prevented his death?
Ion Meyn, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, has studied exactly that. For a 2021 paper, he and his team interviewed police officers across the country and watched dozens of training videos to understand how police think about use of force and what guidelines they learn — even as departments argue that such situations can never be governed by hard and fast rules.
In this case, police say Ruiz pulled a knife when officers were trying to detain him. Meyn predicts authorities will conclude that the officer who shot Ruiz acted in line with his training, and thus that they won’t issue criminal charges or disciplinary action.
“I’ve seen so many of these shootings, so I see the justifications that are going to be provided,” Meyn said.
That, Meyn argues, is why communities should create enforceable rules for police. He spoke with Wisconsin Watch about how police training can make interactions with civilians more dangerous and why officers aren’t the only experts who should shape policing policy.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
According to your research, what rules are police officers following when they’re making decisions about when to use deadly force?
This is a really contested space. If we say “What rules does the Madison Police Department follow?” the first assumption would be that officers only follow the training they hear from Madison Police Department trainers. I don’t believe that. We have officers who are keyed into officer networks. We have supplementary sources of information for training. We have the training that occurs in squad cars after the official training.
There’s a much larger ecosystem of input officers are receiving.
If you look at some of the biggest national providers of training, the videos that are available to officers are very aggressive. From my perspective, many trainers use language that is dehumanizing, that is part of this culture of “us” and “them” that the officer’s duty is to identify criminal elements and to protect good people from these bad people.
I haven’t been privy to the training rooms in the Madison Police Department, so I don’t know exactly what’s being trained, but the (common) general principles include things like “Always retain a tactical advantage,” “Reaction is slower than action,” and “The only person that can deescalate is the civilian.”
Now, there is a Madison Police Department protocol that says when you approach a situation, you should try to build in time in order to allow dialogue between the officer and the suspect. But then it says only do that within what you’ve been reasonably taught about tactics and these other principles, and so those other principles are in so many ways, in conflict with this protocol, and so it’s almost like the exception that swallows the rule.
You can see that playing out in many incidents in the way that the officer interprets the likelihood that they’re going to be subject to some kind of major bodily injury or death. They’re going to imagine the worst-case scenario because they don’t want to give the bad guy the first shot, right?
One of the takeaways from your article is that people without police training often seem to act less violently than police do around some of the same potentially threatening people.
University of Wisconsin Law School associate professor Ion Meyn has interviewed police officers nationwide and reviewed dozens of training videos to study police use-of-force training. (Courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Madison)
That is the conclusion I draw. Take Tamir Rice (the 12-year-old Cleveland boy who was shot and killed by a police officer who mistook his toy gun for a real gun). If you watch the video of Tamir Rice with his fake gun that looked like a gun, he’s kind of waving it around. People walk by him before the police get there, and they wave him away, or they say, “What are you doing?” They’re assessing risk and they’re not seeing an imminent threat, or if they’re seeing a threat, they’re deescalating it and seeing what they can do.
This also happens in situations where someone has a knife and (other civilians) are trying to talk to the person with the knife, but they’re scared. They’re keeping their distance, and it’s been going on like this for a while. Then they call the cops, and the guy’s dead in 10 seconds. Why is that?
The reason is their training. The training makes this person with a knife (appear) much more dangerous than they are to a person who might be trying to assess the situation without that training. Another thing that you see in training is a constant flow of videos that show officers getting hurt, and that’s just not empirically a representation of what happens in these situations.
Criminologist Franklin Zimring argues that police departments should write rules that tell officers when to refrain from shooting or stop shooting. What kind of rules do you think police should be following?
To me, (the question is), what kind of conversation are we going to have about the rules we want, and who’s an expert on what force should be used? Who is the Madison City Council going to invite into police reform, and how significant a voice are they going to give to, say, sociologists and social workers? The best way forward is inviting those voices in and giving them a significant role.
I am not the person to come up with the best set of rules, but I am the person that’s going to say, “It’s clear that you’re not bringing in other voices. It’s clear that you’re not bringing in empirical data to appropriately assess risk.”
Another point you make in your article is that community members should trust their own reactions to these kinds of events, and that local governments can actually set their own standards for how they want police to operate.
They can. Police departments will say, “We’re in compliance with the law and national standards and the Constitution and all those things, and therefore your attempt to change things is unreasonable.” That is absolutely wrong.
What the Supreme Court actually said is, “It’s not our job to regulate training or use of force. Our job is to say if a police department uses a tactic that is so egregious, that it’s unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.” That’s regulating an outer boundary of minimally acceptable conduct. The court said, “We leave it to communities to determine how they want to be policed.”
So communities have a lot of power to regulate it. They’re going to be up against a police union. They’re going to be up against powerful political players. They’re going to be up against an organized campaign that will tell people who are trying to change it that they have no right to speak in this space.
So that’s the political aspect of it, but it’s certainly not a legal one. There’s no legal constraint to changing the way that we train police.
You predict there won’t be any criminal or administrative sanctions regarding Corey Ruiz’s death. Given that, what do you hope might come out of this incident?
My hope every time with these things is that it increases the number of people talking about it in a way that is open and curious. They want to learn how police are trained. They want to learn what rules officers are subject to. By the way, it’s very dangerous for civilians if they don’t know what police training is.
(I also hope) people start feeling like they have a voice. I’ve just seen people get stepped on left and right, told that they just don’t have the right to speak, that they don’t know anything about policing, that they don’t know what it’s like to face a bad guy. That’s the constant refrain you hear.
And I really hope that this community in Madison works with dispatch and comes up with a program that really is serious about directing a good portion of calls away from police into folks with a different set of expertise that’s much more based on getting social support for people.
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Most Wisconsin law enforcement agencies use body-worn cameras.
The Madison Police Department, despite being one of the largest in the state, does not — at least not department-wide.
That could change, if Common Council members support a budget proposal backed by the mayor and the police department.
Madison’s lack of body cameras has drawn renewed attention in recent days after a Madison officer fatally shot Corey Ruiz, a 38-year-old Black man last Wednesday. Police say the officer was injured after Ruiz pulled a knife. Four officers are now on leave pending a Wisconsin Department of Justice investigation.
Currently, the only Madison officers with body-worn cameras are those on the SWAT team and motorcycle unit.
But at a Thursday press conference about the killing of Ruiz, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said she wanted to fund body-worn cameras for the entire police department. She’s backing a three-year phased plan, that would lead to full adoption by 2029.
That comes after years of contentious debate and multiple failed proposals to broaden the use of body cameras.
“We are in a major metropolitan city in the state of Wisconsin, and Madison is one of the few cities that still does not have police body cameras,” attorney B’Ivory Lamarr said. “In 2026, solving a police shooting should not be a mystery.”
Corey Ruiz’s brother, Adam Ruiz, also said body cameras are needed.
Candles and flowers mark a makeshift memorial at the site where Corey Ruiz was fatally shot by a Madison police officer, July 22, 2026 in Madison, Wis. (Wes Hogg for Wisconsin Watch)
“I believe that system is corrupted and us, as the people, we need to stand up and come together to put a stop to this madness,” Adam Ruiz said. “They need body cameras to stop future incidents to stop future incidents from happening.”
Bystanders took video of the shooting, and Ruiz’s attorneys said, given MPD’s lack of body camera, that footage is essential.
“If there wasn’t video, we can only imagine what the narrative would have been,” attorney Ben Crump said. “Thank God for all of those people who had their cell phones out.”
Mayor says cost swayed her decision
Previously, Rhodes-Conway supported a pilot program that tested out body cameras on a limited basis. But until now, the mayor had not committed to backing a permanent body camera program.
On Thursday, Rhodes-Conway said budget considerations had swayed her decision.
“My main concern has been the cost,” Rhodes-Conway said in response to question from WPR. “When we initially got the estimates from the pilot, there was a very large price tag, and the (police) chief has worked to bring that price tag down in various ways.”
In a budget request submitted earlier this year, Madison’s police department asked for $414,784 over three years to roll out body cameras. That phased approach would start with officers in the city’s north policing district in 2027. By 2029, the cameras would be used across the entire city.
Rhodes-Conway says she plans to back that request from the police department when she submits her own budget proposal later this year. The funding would ultimately need to be approved by Madison’s Common Council.
Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway speaks during a press conference, Dec. 16, 2024. (Brad Horn for Wisconsin Watch)
For more than a decade, Madison body cam proposals have stalled
For more than a decade, Madison’s elected officials have debated whether the city’s entire police force should use body cameras. But efforts to introduce the cameras have been stymied. Over the years, opposition has come from some of the Common Council’s more left-wing members, as well as from some local activists.
The use of body cameras often gains attention in the context of police misconduct. But increasingly, law enforcement officials are using body camera footage as evidence to secure convictions.
During a Common Council meeting in 2023, Madison resident Steve Verburg was among those who spoke out against body cameras.
“What’s happening is this ongoing surveillance ends up worsening over-policing of marginalized communities,” he said.
Another resident, former Common Council candidate Michelle Ellinger Linley, told the council the purpose of body cameras is “not to make our communities safer, but to uphold unnecessary surveillance, tracking and record-keeping of communities at highest risk for exploitation.”
Council president: Community now wants body cameras
More recently, in November 2025, Alder Barbara Harrington-McKinney introduced an amendment that would have redirected just over $400,000 from the Office of the Independent Police Monitor to fund “staffing capacity needs related to implementing body worn cameras.” That amendment failed 17-3.
The amendment would have eliminated the police monitor’s annual budget. And some alders complained it was introduced too late in the budget process.
On Thursday, Madison Common Council President Sabrina Madison said she believes a body camera proposal will clear the council in 2026.
“The community, for a while, was not wanting to implement body-worn cameras yet,” Madison said. “That has changed.”
The city’s police cruisers are outfitted with dashboard and backseat cameras. And cellphone videos from bystanders have been circulating online after Wednesday’s shooting.
But DOJ investigators have no way to review body camera footage if it doesn’t exist.
In an interview with WPR, Madison said it’s impossible to know whether a body-worn camera would have changed the outcome of Wednesday’s shooting. But she said those cameras could provide additional information.
“Now folks are really having that discussion more often about what is the gap that we’re missing when we don’t have that footage,” Madison said.
Madison Police Department backs body cameras
During Thursday’s news conference, Police Chief John Patterson spoke about tensions in Madison following the killing of Ruiz.
“Everyone in this room can feel the thinness of trust in this city right now,” Patterson said.
He called MPD’s lack of body cameras “another challenge to repairing trust in our community.”
Patterson’s predecessor, former Police Chief Shon Barnes, tried to implement department-wide body cameras. Barnes was unable to do so before he left to lead Seattle’s police department last year.
Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes speaks during a press conference on Dec. 16, 2024. (Brad Horn for Wisconsin Watch)
The Wisconsin Professional Police Association, a union representing police officers, has also advocated for body-worn cameras.
“Unfortunately, because Madison officers are not equipped with body-worn cameras, investigators and the public will not have the benefit of video from the officers’ perspectives in this most recent case,” said the association’s executive director Jim Palmer, referring to the shooting of Ruiz. “Body-worn cameras aren’t perfect and don’t always capture everything an officer sees or experiences, but they can provide critically important additional evidence and context.”
During Madison’s last mayoral election in spring 2023, Rhodes-Conway’s opponent, Gloria Reyes, came out in support of citywide body cameras. Reyes is a former Madison police detective, who was endorsed by the city’s police union.
At the time, Rhodes-Conway did not categorically oppose the proposal. But she cautioned that body cameras alone cannot solve police violence.
Rhodes-Conway expressed a similar sentiment in the days after the killing of Ruiz.
“(Body cameras) are part of a solution,” Rhodes-Conway said Thursday. “But they are not the solution.”
If the police department’s latest proposal is approved, Madison would purchase 220 of body cameras by 2029.
Milwaukee has become part of a mass surveillance apparatus. Surveillance technology is dangerous, and few know that these are counterinsurgency tactics being practiced on residents by our own police department.
Integrated surveillance technology tactics, like drones, automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), video cameras, “Stingray” international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) catchers, and social media trackers, were developed during colonial endeavors and on battlefields like Vietnam, Colombia and the Middle East to pacify local populations.
These types of surveillance technologies made their way back for use against the domestic populace in the United States.
The dangers of Flock cameras
It’s unfortunate that the police have resorted to counterinsurgency tactics to surveil Milwaukee residents, but one is uniquely dangerous: automated license plate reading technology, more popularly known as Flock cameras.
Flock technology can establish a “pattern of life” for Milwaukee residents, especially when combined with other surveillance technologies, without a warrant or probable cause.
A “pattern of life” is the recurring patterns, behaviors and cycles that make up your average day-to-day activities. Establishing a pattern of life involves law enforcement collecting surveillance data and combining it to build a detailed picture of a person’s habits, routines, relationships and behavior. This includes where a person sleeps, when they leave, where they work, where they regularly meet, what vehicle they drive, which routes they take and much more.
Flock cameras and other automatic license plate recognition tools also record other information, such as make, model, color, body style, temporary tags, damage and stickers. They call it the “vehicle footprint” and use it when there is no license plate or the license plate is unreadable. These cameras actually record everything in a wide angle, but allegedly the interface that the local police can see only displays what I’ve mentioned.
The companies that make them, and theoretically anyone who accesses the recording, can see everything captured in the videos. That means faces, cellphones, clothes, actions – everything.
The Milwaukee Police Department combines this with open-source intelligence like Babel Street, which analyzes publicly available information, such as social media data. This means they can also begin to build out a psychological profile, ideology, interests and a network of associates.
Over-policing the community
The Milwaukee Police Department made more arrests for reckless driving in 2025 compared to 2024. (Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service file photo)
Although the MPD has acquired this technology under the pretext of solving crime, it indiscriminately monitors all Milwaukee residents’ whereabouts and online activities, and that does not make Milwaukee safer. Instead, it reinforces over-policing, and these technologies tend to be concentrated in Black and Latino communities.
Studies show that over-policing produces more crime because it deteriorates community-police relations, causing communities to abide by what sociologists call the “code of the street,” which causes retaliatory violence.
Researchers have clearly illustrated that most crime is a result of unmet needs, so if we intend to make Milwaukee safe, policing and surveilling the populace will not create a safe community. If people still have to survive harsh circumstances, the government can place all the surveillance technology and police they desire; people will still find ways to survive when faced with intense, concentrated poverty, hyper-segregation, economic exclusion and structural racism.
Furthermore, the current federal landscape has set a dangerous precedent for how it accesses and exploits the surveillance data collected by local police and sheriff’s departments. We must oppose and ban Flock automated license plate readers and any other technology that undermines civil liberties and privacy. The abuse of these technologies causes more problems for Milwaukee residents. We need to remove them to protect our privacy and democracy.
Nickolas X Dohertyis the Confronting Mass Incarceration coordinator at the Milwaukee Turners.
Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service invites community members to submit opinion pieces of 500-800 words on topics of interest to central city Milwaukee. To send a submission for consideration, please email info@milwaukeenns.org. The views expressed are solely those of the authors.
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