Candles, flowers, crosses and plenty of television cameras have accented the Madison cityscape following a shooting at Abundant Life Christian School that wounded six and killed three, including the 15-year-old shooter. 

Here’s what it looked like this week as community members gathered to support traumatized families and memorialize lives lost.

Police and first responders lined Buckeye Road as investigations continued.

Abundant Life remains closed to students. The United Way of Dane County has established an Abundant Life Christian School Emergency and Recovery Fund, with all proceeds going to those affected by the shooting, according to the school’s website. Supporters can donate online or text help4ALCS to the number 40403.

By Tuesday morning, news media vehicles swarmed where parents would have dropped off their children on normal school days. Reporters conducted interviews along Buckeye Road, lining sidewalks and street parking spaces.

Police tape surrounded the school and neighboring City Church. Flowers and candles lined the sidewalk.

On a chilly Tuesday evening, hundreds mourned at a candlelit vigil at the Wisconsin Capitol.

Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Joe Gothard and Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway called on the community to support those affected. 

“That is where our focus is right now — caring for everyone who has been impacted,” Rhodes-Conway said. “Let us be a community that takes care of each other.”

She highlighted resources available through the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Office of School Safety and Office of Crime Victim Services, available 24-7 at 1-800-697-8761 or schoolsafety@doj.state.wi.us.

Vigil attendees sang and held their hands near their candles, protecting flames from gusts of wind. They wrote messages on crosses representing the dead.

“We will fight for change so this can’t happen again,” read one message.

Calls to end gun violence have echoed throughout Madison, including a plea from the Wisconsin State Journal’s editorial board to “break America’s curse of gunfire in schools.”

Photos: Madison mourns after Abundant Life Christian School shooting is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The school shooting this week at Abundant Life Christian in Madison, Wisconsin, is tragic and senseless, but it’s not at all shocking. Deliberately planned school shootings happen multiple times every school year, mostly in smaller rural and suburban communities. The perpetrators of these attacks are almost always actively suicidal current or former students at the school they target.

Back in April, I wrote an article for the 25th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting. This trend line turned out to be sadly accurate. With the shooting at Abundant Life Christian, there have been five pre-planned attacks at schools this year.

Regardless of how you measure school shootings — guns fired, wounded, killed, active shooter, planned attacks, or near misses — the trend line is going up. While these planned school shootings have taken place since the 1960s, the frequency of the attacks is steadily increasing.

Like the other planned attacks this year in Perry, Iowa; Mount Horeb, Wisconsin; Apalachee, Georgia; and Palermo, California, these incidents have common patterns and connections to prior school shootings. The number of “near misses” where a school shooting almost happens are also going up.

Columbine connection

The father of the 15-year-old Madison, Wisconsin, school shooter posted a Facebook photo of his daughter at a shooting range in August. His cover photo shows Natalie Rupnow, who went by the name Samantha.

Natalie can be seen wearing a black shirt with the name of the band KMFDM. The German industrial rock band’s lyrics were thrust into the dark subculture of school shooters by the students who carried out the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School.

In the Columbine “basement tapes,” Dylan Klebold can be seen wearing the same shirt. It’s critical for parents to study prior school shooters, know their names and faces, and recognize symbols like KMFDM that represent idolization of prior attacks.

In January 2024 at Perry High, the 17-year-old student perpetrator entered the school with a shotgun, pistol, knife, and IED inside a duffel bag (important note: both planned attacks at schools in the spring of 2024 involved IEDs). He spent 22 minutes inside a school bathroom where he posted photos of himself with the gun, posted on a Discord “school shooting massacres” channel, posted the same KMFDM song played by the Columbine shooters, and started a livestream on social media.

Insider attacks

The Madison shooting follows the common patterns with planned attacks at schools. The perpetrator was a student (insider), committed a surprise attack during morning classes and died by suicide before police arrived.

Most school shootings are committed by current or former students who are “insiders” at the school and know the security plan/procedures.

Since an insider is someone who is allowed to be inside the school, most of these attacks are committed by current students.

Female school shooter

I co-published an article in the Los Angeles Times: Here’s what is so unusual about the Wisconsin school shooting — and what isn’t:

Inside during morning classes

Pre-planned school shootings usually take place during morning classes or at the start of the school day when the building is open before classes start.

Just like the shooting in Wisconsin this week, the most common outcome is the teenage student shooter commits suicide, surrenders or is subdued by students or staff before police intervene.

Begins and ends in the same room

While “active shooter training” videos produced by the Department of Homeland Security and ads by security tech vendors portray assailants roaming throughout a building while searching for every possible victim, most school shootings begin and end in the same room.

There isn’t much use for a ballistic chalkboard, drop bar lock on the door or panic button when the victims are all in close proximity to an armed assailant who is inside the same room with them.

Following this pattern, the shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, took place in a classroom during study hall, and the victims were in the same age group. The teenage shooter didn’t roam the building looking for the elementary school kids; she killed herself before police arrived.

Police usually don’t stop these single shooter insider attacks because they are very short duration incidents that are usually over within the first two minutes.

Concealed handguns

When a student is committing a surprise attack inside a school, the easiest weapon to sneak inside is a handgun. Most students who are arrested inside schools with guns have a handgun hidden inside their backpack. Because of that, it’s not a surprise that a handgun is the most common weapon used during a school shooting by an insider.

During just these deliberately planned attacks over the last 60 years (these victim counts in the chart do not represent all shootings on school property), there have been roughly twice as many victims killed or wounded with handguns versus rifles.

This doesn’t mean that rifles aren’t as dangerous. At Apalachee High, a student committed an insider attack by sneaking an AR-15 into the building inside a posterboard. Until the last decade, AR-15s weren’t cheap and easily accessible. As there continue to be more school shootings involving rifles, this chart will likely even out over time (unless we take meaningful action to stop these attacks).

Preventing the next school shooting

I spoke to NBC 5 Investigates on Monday afternoon right after the school shooting. I said that this shooting at Abundant Life Christian School followed a common pattern in that it was carried out by an “insider” — a student familiar with the school grounds.

“We need to understand the actual nature of this problem and apply solutions towards identifying the student who has a grievance, identifying a student who is talking about students and realizing that these are rarely random acts. All the opportunities to prevent it happen before they ever come to campus with a gun,” Riedman told NBC 5 Investigates.

Riedman said the focus should not be on fortifying schools with additional weapons detectors or metal detectors but focusing on the students’ behaviors that may help foretell a future incident — adding that there is a need to “dispel the myth that these school shootings are committed by scary outsiders,” when data shows that they are often committed by those who are familiar with the school and have a grievance that ends in violence.

“We will probably hear in the coming days about a series of missed warning signs, social media posts, a manifesto and so on,” he said.

Analysis: Six common factors in the school shooting at Abundant Life Christian is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

A 15-year-old student killed a teacher and another teenager with a handgun Monday at a Christian school in Wisconsin, terrifying classmates. A second-grade teacher made the 911 call that sent dozens of police officers rushing to the small school just a week before its Christmas break.

The female student, who was identified at a press conference Monday night, also wounded six others at a study hall at Abundant Life Christian School, including two students who were in critical condition, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said. A teacher and three students had been taken to a hospital with less serious injuries, and two of them had been released by Monday evening.

“Every child, every person in that building is a victim and will be a victim forever. … We need to figure out and try to piece together what exactly happened,” Barnes said.

Barbara Wiers, director of elementary and school relations for Abundant Life Christian School, said students “handled themselves magnificently.”

She said when the school practices safety routines, which it had done just before the school year, leaders always announce that it is a drill. That didn’t happen Monday.

“When they heard, ‘Lockdown, lockdown,’ they knew it was real,” she said.

Police said the shooter, identified as Natalie Rupnow, was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound when officers arrived and died en route to a hospital. Barnes declined to offer additional details about the shooter, partly out of respect for the family.

He also warned people against sharing unconfirmed reports on social media about the shooter’s identity.

“What that does is it helps erode the trust in this process,” he said.

Abundant Life is a nondenominational Christian school — prekindergarten through high school — with approximately 420 students in Madison, the state capital.

Wiers said the school does not have metal detectors but uses other security measures including cameras.

Children and families were reunited at a medical building about a mile away. Parents pressed children against their chests while others squeezed hands and shoulders as they walked side by side. One girl was comforted with an adult-size coat around her shoulders as she moved to a parking lot teeming with police vehicles.

A motive for the shooting was not immediately known, but Barnes said they’re talking with the parents of the suspected shooter and they are cooperating. He also said he didn’t know if the people shot had been targeted.

“I don’t know why, and I feel like if we did know why, we could stop these things from happening,” he told reporters.

A search warrant had been issued Monday to a Madison home, he said.

Barnes said Tuesday the first 911 call to report an active shooter came in shortly before 11 a.m. from a second-grade teacher — not a second-grade student as he reported publicly Monday.

First responders who were in training just 3 miles away dashed to the school for an actual emergency, Barnes said. They arrived 3 minutes after the initial call and went into the building immediately.

Classes had been taking place when the shooting happened, Barnes said.

Investigators believe the shooter used a 9mm pistol, a law enforcement official told the AP. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.

Police blocked off roads around the school, and federal agents were at the scene to assist local law enforcement. No shots were fired by police.

Abundant Life asked for prayers in a brief Facebook post.

Wiers said the school’s goal is to have staff get together early in the week and have community opportunities for students to reconnect before the winter break, but it’s still to be decided whether they will resume classes this week.

Bethany Highman, the mother of a student, rushed to the school and learned over FaceTime that her daughter was OK.

“As soon as it happened, your world stops for a minute. Nothing else matters,” Highman said. “There’s nobody around you. You just bolt for the door and try to do everything you can as a parent to be with your kids.”

In a statement, President Joe Biden cited the tragedy in calling on Congress to pass universal background checks, a national red flag law and certain gun restrictions.

“We can never accept senseless violence that traumatizes children, their families, and tears entire communities apart,” Biden said. He spoke with Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway and offered his support.

Evers said it’s “unthinkable” that a child or teacher would go to school and never return home.

The episode was the 323rd shooting at a K-12 school campus thus far in 2024, according to researcher David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database. The database uses a broad definition of shooting that includes when a gun is brandished, fired or a bullet hits school property.

“This shooting follows the common patterns with planned attacks at schools. The perpetrator was a student (insider), committed a surprise attack during morning classes, and died by suicide before police arrived,” Riedman wrote Monday on his website.

It was the the latest among dozens of school shootings across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas.

The shootings have set off fervent debates about gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children are growing up accustomed to doing active shooter drills in their classrooms. But school shootings have done little to move the needle on national gun laws.

Firearms were the leading cause of death among children in 2020 and 2021, according to KFF, a nonprofit that researches health care issues.

Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said the country needs to do more to prevent gun violence.

“I hoped that this day would never come to Madison,” she said.

Wisconsin Watch contributed information to this story.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Teacher and a teenage student killed in a shooting at a Christian school in Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Gun violence homicides dropped by nearly 17% in Wisconsin over the first eight months of 2024 compared to the same time period in 2023, according to a report by the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute.

The report, released in September, also found that gun violence victimizations, defined as all firearm-related injuries and deaths, dropped in Milwaukee nearly 20% over that same time period.

“I think this decrease is happening for a number of reasons, but one is due to community violence intervention measures that are working,” said Nicholas Matuszewski, executive director of Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort, a statewide grassroots organization.

Local violence intervention efforts include 414 Life, a violence interruption program; and Project Ujima, which provides services to families and children who’ve been impacted by violence.

In addition, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley announced in late October the launch of the national gun violence program “Advance Peace.”

“Advance Peace is an investment in solutions to decreasing gun violence that will help ensure Milwaukee County is a safe and healthy community where families and children can thrive,” Crowley said in a news release announcing the program.

‘Numbers are dropping’

Matuszewski said Milwaukee and the state are national leaders in community violence intervention efforts, citing the work of the City of Milwaukee Office of Community Wellness and Safety and also programs supported statewide through Wisconsin Community Safety Fund grants.

The Wisconsin Community Safety Fund grants provided 10 organizations, including the Alma Center in Milwaukee, with $10.4 million in funding to reduce violence stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“After the pandemic, we had a huge increase in gun ownership and gun purchases which naturally led to more gun violence,” Matuszewski said. “Those numbers are dropping now.”

While many cities cited in the report have seen gun violence return or drop to pre-pandemic levels, Milwaukee is still on pace to experience more shootings this year than in 2019, the year before the pandemic.

According to data from the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission dashboard, there were 442 nonfatal shootings in 2019. Those numbers rose to more than 750 each year from 2020 to 2023. So far this year, the city has experienced 471 shootings, according to information on the dashboard. 

‘Too many shootings’

Travis Hope, a community activist who conducts street outreach on Milwaukee’s South Side, said gun violence still occurs at an alarming rate in the city.

“Too many shootings are still happening and impacting families, communities and especially young people,” Hope said.

According to data from the Milwaukee Police Department, there have been 119 homicides in the city so far this year, compared to 153 during the same time period in 2023 and 192 in 2022.

The number of nonfatal shootings in Milwaukee also is down significantly, with 471 so far this year, compared to 769 at this time in 2023 and 788 in 2022.

Officials address drop in gun violence in Milwaukee

During a news conference discussing the reduction in shootings, among other crimes in the city, Mayor Cavalier Johnson cited the work of the Milwaukee Police Department as one reason for the drop in shootings and other crime this year.

“The work that they do is a big factor, a huge factor, in making Milwaukee safer,” he said.

Johnson said that in addition to law enforcement, intervention efforts have also been key in reducing crime.

“When we prevent a crime through intervention, that makes each and every one of us safer,” he said.

Ashanti Hamilton, director of the Office of Community Safety and Wellness, said that while the decrease in homicides and nonfatal shootings is promising, more work needs to be done.

“Reducing violence is an ongoing process,” he said. “Sustainable change requires addressing the root causes of crime, and this means looking beyond the immediate crime reduction strategies and focusing on broader social, economic and systemic changes that contribute to violence.”

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

Report: Gun violence down across Wisconsin, including Milwaukee is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin budgets nearly $463,000 a year to incarcerate each child at the state’s beleaguered juvenile prison complex in the North Woods, a figure that has ballooned over a decade as enrollment has plummeted.

A new Department of Corrections budget request would nearly double that figure to about $862,000 a year — 58 times what taxpayers spend on the average K-12 public school student.

It comes as efforts to close the Lincoln County complex — home to Lincoln Hills School for boys and Copper Lake School for girls — and build a new youth prison in Milwaukee have slowed to a crawl.  

Six years after the Legislature approved the closure plan, Republican lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers are blaming each other during funding and policy disagreements that have delayed the closure. 

A 2018 legal settlement restricted how guards could discipline youth. That followed a series of scandals involving allegations of inhumane conditions, such as frequent use of pepper spray, strip searches and mechanical restraints and solitary confinement. 

Republicans earlier this year pushed to lift pepper spray restrictions after a 16-year-old incarcerated at Lincoln Hills struck a counselor in the face, resulting in his death. A judge denied requests to alter the settlement in a dispute that has added to closure delays, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Meanwhile, the facility’s population is dwindling. As of late November, it served just 41 boys and 18 girls on a campus designed for more than 500 youth.  

Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service spoke to judges, lawmakers, former prison staff and researchers about the eye-popping price tag to incarcerate fewer young people. They attributed the trends to demographic changes, a paradigm shift from large youth prisons to smaller regional facilities and scandals on the campus that made judges hesitant to send teens to Lincoln Hills. 

“No judge wants to send a kid to Lincoln Hills,” said Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Laura Crivello, who has presided over juvenile cases. “You feel like you’re damning the kid. And if you look at the recidivism rates that come out of Lincoln Hills, you pretty much are damning a kid.” 

Here’s a closer look at the numbers. 

Who sets budgets for youth prisons? 

Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake schools are the state’s only youth prisons, but they are among four main state facilities for young people convicted of serious juvenile offenses. The others are Mendota Mental Health Institute, a psychiatric hospital in Madison that treats youth involved in the juvenile justice system, and Grow Academy, a residential incarceration-alternative program outside of Madison.

The Legislature sets uniform daily rates that counties pay to send youth to any of the locations — spreading costs across all facilities. 

In 2015, lawmakers approved a daily rate of $284 per juvenile across all four facilities, or nearly $104,000 a year. This year’s rate is $1,268 a day, or nearly $463,000 annually. 

The annual per-student rate would jump to about $841,000 in 2025 and nearly $862,000 in 2026 if the Legislature approves the latest Department of Corrections funding request. 

By contrast, Wisconsin spent an annual average of $14,882 per student in K-12 public schools in 2023, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. 

Why have costs ballooned? 

A campus built for more than 500 is mostly underused as enrollment declines, but taxpayers must still pay to maintain the same large space. It affects county budgets since they pay for youth they send to state juvenile correctional facilities.

Fixed infrastructure and staffing costs account for the largest share of expenses, said department spokesperson Beth Hardtke. Spreading the costs among fewer juveniles inflates the per capita price tag.

But taxpayers haven’t seen overall savings from the steep drop in enrollment either. The state in 2015 budgeted about $25.9 million for the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake complex. That number climbed to about $31.3 million by 2023 with the addition of staff — a cost increase nearly in line with inflation during that period. 

Driving requests to further hike rates: The Department of Corrections seeks $19.4 million in 2026 and $19.8 million in 2027 to expand Mendota Mental Health Institute’s capacity from 29 beds for boys to 93 beds serving girls or boys — an expansion required by state law. 

The expansion requires adding 123 positions at the facility. Such additions affect calculations for the rates of all state facilities for incarcerated juveniles, including Lincoln Hills.  

Why are there fewer incarcerated students? 

The trends driving high costs at Lincoln Hills started more than 20 years ago, said Jason Stein, president of the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

First, Wisconsin is home to increasingly fewer young people. 

The state’s population of youth under 18 has been shrinking. The state saw a 3.2% dip between 2012 and 2021 — from 1,317,004 juveniles to 1,274,605 juveniles, according to a  Legislative Fiscal Bureau report.

Juvenile arrests in Wisconsin dropped by 66% during the same period.  

Meanwhile, judges became reluctant to sentence juveniles to Lincoln Hills —  even before abuse allegations escalated and prompted authorities to raid the campus in 2015.     

“I was the presiding judge at Children’s Court, when we blew open the fact that kids weren’t getting an education and they were having their arms broken,” said Mary Triggiano, an adjunct professor at Marquette University Law School and former District 1 Circuit Court chief judge.

“But we knew before that there were problems with Lincoln Hills because we watched the recidivism rates. We would bring in DOC and say: ‘Tell me what kind of services you’re going to give. Tell me why they’re not in school. Tell me why you’re keeping them in segregation for hours and hours and hours’ — when we know that’s awful for kids who experience trauma.”

Enrollment dropped and costs increased, but outcomes didn’t improve. 

More than 61% of the 131 boys who left Lincoln Hills in 2018 committed a new offense within three years, while about 47% of the 15 girls who left Copper Lake reoffended. The recidivism rate for boys during that period was roughly the same as it was for those released in 2014. The rate for girls was worse than the nearly 42% it was four years earlier. 

Stein compared Lincoln Hills to a restaurant that tries to compensate for lost customers by raising meal prices. If prices keep rising, customers will look for a different restaurant, he said. 

“That, in a nutshell, is how you get into this spiral where you’re seeing fewer residents, higher rates, and greater costs for counties,” Stein said. “Then it’s just rinse and repeat.”

How much do other states spend to incarcerate youth?  

Wisconsin is not the only state spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per juvenile it incarcerates. 

A 2020 Justice Policy Institute report showed Wisconsin spent less than the national average in 2020. But Wisconsin’s per-juvenile costs have since more than tripled as Lincoln Hills remains open and incarcerates fewer young people.  

Incarcerating juveniles is generally more expensive than it is for adults, said Ryan King, director of research and policy at Justice Policy Institute. Rehabilitation plays a bigger role in juvenile corrections, and those programs cost more. Incarcerated children typically access more  counseling, education and case management programs. 

States nationwide are rethinking their approach to youth incarceration as crime rates fall and more research shows how prison damages children, King said. 

“There was an acknowledgement that locking kids up was not only failing to make communities safer, but it was making kids worse, and really just putting them in a position where they were more likely to end up in the adult system,” he said.  

How is Wisconsin trying to reshape juvenile justice? 

In 2018, then-Gov. Scott Walker signed Act 185, designed to restructure the state’s juvenile justice system. The law kicked off plans for a new state youth prison in Milwaukee and authorized counties to build their own secure, residential care centers.

Milwaukee and Racine counties are moving forward on such plans to build these centers. The centers function similarly to county jails: County officials operate them under Department of Corrections oversight. Officials hope keeping youth closer to home will help them maintain family connections. 

“We have always pushed smaller is better. You can’t warehouse young people like you do adults,” said Sharlen Moore, a Milwaukee alderwoman and co-founder of Youth Justice Milwaukee. “Their brain just doesn’t comprehend things in that way.”

The law aimed to close troubled Lincoln Hills and give judges more options at sentencing while balancing the needs of juvenile offenders and the public. But those options have yet to fully develop. 

Today’s alternative programs typically have limited space and extensive waitlists. That won’t be fixed until more regional facilities go online. 

How else could Wisconsin spend on troubled youth? 

Triggiano, now director of the Marquette Law School’s Andrew Center for Restorative Justice, was astounded to learn youth incarceration costs could nearly double next year. 

“You just want to drop to your knees because if I had that money, we had that money, what could we do differently?” she said. 

She quickly offered ideas: programs that recognize how traumatic experiences shape behavior, violence prevention outreach in schools, community mentorship programs — evidence-based practices shown to help children and teens. Milwaukee County had worked to create some of those programs before funding was pulled, Triggiano said.

“It all got blown up in a variety of ways at every juncture,” she said. “Now there’s going to be an attachment to the secure detention facility because that’s all people could muster up after being slammed down every time we tried to do something that we thought was going to work.”

State Rep. Darrin Madison, D-Milwaukee, echoed Triggiano and offered additional spending suggestions, such as housing resources, mental health support and summer jobs programs. 

“The cost of sending one young person to Lincoln Hills would be enough to pay several young people working jobs over summer or the span of the school year,” Madison said.  

Wisconsin’s disproportionate spending on incarcerating its young people runs counter to the Wisconsin Idea, its historical commitment to education, he added. 

“We’re so committed to incarcerating people that we’re willing to eat the cost of doing so, as opposed to making investments in deterrence and getting at the root cause of the problems.” 

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

One child, $463,000 per year: Ballooning costs of troubled Lincoln Hills youth prison is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The Milwaukee Police Department has a hiring problem.

It can’t find enough recruits to offset retirements and the departure of others. 

Ald. Lamont Westmoreland, who represents the 5th District on the city’s Northwest Side, said residents are feeling the impact.

“Lack of police presence, long wait times on calls, all tied back to the lack of sworn officers that MPD has,” Westmoreland said.

Leon Todd, executive director of the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission, which has primary responsibility in the city for recruiting, testing and hiring new officers, agrees.

“Having more officers and growing the size of MPD will do a host of things to improve public safety,” he said. “Shorter response times, higher clearance rates, more proactive time for officers to do follow-up or investigative work and have greater visibility and engagement opportunities in the community all drive down crime in various ways.”

In 2023, the Milwaukee Fire and Police Academy graduated 101 new police officers, while the Milwaukee Police Department lost 112 officers to retirement, resignation or termination, Westmoreland said.

The pace of recruitment is slow again this year, with departures of officers once again outpacing new police cadets.

The city also risks missing mandates that require beefing up the number of police officers in the city as part of the Act 12 Wisconsin funding law or face millions in fines. Act 12 created avenues to implement local sales taxes as a way to pump more money into the budget and offset spiraling costs.

“I have no issue with the mandate because I do think that we need more officers on the streets,” Westmoreland said. “At the same time, you can’t force people to apply for the job.”

Recruitment challenges and efforts

Westmoreland said Milwaukee is among a number of urban cities that are facing similar hiring challenges, including competition from better-paying suburban police departments with less dangerous work environments.

“We can’t use that as a crutch,” Westmoreland said. “We’ve got to be creative with the approach of recruitment.”

Todd said the Fire and Police Commission has made several adjustments over the past few years to find new police, including hiring two staff members dedicated to recruitment, participating in more community events and job fairs and ramping up marketing efforts to city residents.

“One of the things we’ve tried to do is highlight the stories of officers to let residents know that they are people that care about the community and want to help make it safer,” Todd said.

The commission also now accepts applications year-round instead of shorter windows of a few months. It also changed the testing process to allow for online entrance exams, eliminating additional barriers for applicants. 

Changes since pandemic and civil unrest

Kristine Rodriguez, a deputy for the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office who also supports recruitment efforts, said her organization faces similar challenges as MPD, especially since COVID and the George Floyd protests.

“Some of the things that happened during that time still resonate with people,” she said.

She said pay is also an issue, with suburban departments offering hiring bonuses and higher starting pays. They also work fewer hours sometimes, she said, as staffing shortages can result in mandatory overtime and fewer days off.

The current starting salary for recruits at MPD is $47,673.69 and increases to $63,564.75 upon graduation from the academy. Police officers can earn up to $84,743.87 while supervisors and other specialists can earn more.

‘Under a microscope’

Another possible deterrent, Rodriguez said, is the scrutiny officers face nowadays.

“You’re under a microscope 24/7 and that might scare some candidates away,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez said that her department places a heavy emphasis on community engagement, cultural competency and mental health training and that its relationship with the community has improved. She said the job itself is extremely fulfilling.

“We know that our heart is in the right place, and that’s what makes the job the most rewarding is doing good for the community,” she said.

Others weigh in

Gregory Barachy, who’s worked for the Milwaukee Fire Department for 29 years, said he thinks that being a police officer is probably less desirable now because of the danger and the lack of accountability for those who commit crimes.

“Crime is insane here, car theft is an epidemic along with the driving that goes with it,” Barachy said. “And then if you happen to arrest someone, they are released without penalty to do it again. Why would someone want to risk their lives for that?”

Barachy, who recently began a position with the Milwaukee Overdose Response Initiative, said the fire department has also experienced a huge reduction in applicants.

“We only had a list of 250 this time, while 20 years ago the list was 10,000,” he said.

Carla Jones, whose partner was mistaken as a suspect and arrested by Brookfield police in November 2023, said she believes fewer people want to become police officers because of a lack of support they receive.

“Some of the main reasons people are joining law enforcement less and less is the lack of morale or real support officers are given,” Jones said. “They’re not doing that because they’re working on a reactive mentality.” 

A call to disinvest

Devin Anderson is membership and campaign director for the African American Roundtable, which launched the Liberate MKE campaign in 2019 to push for divestment in law enforcement and more investment in community programming.

“In order to build a more just Milwaukee, we have to be moving money away from police and policing,” Anderson said. “We’d rather see fully funded libraries.”

Anderson said that residents want more safety and that some view policing as the only way to achieve that. But, he said, creating a safer city requires addressing root causes of crime, which the police department doesn’t do.

“They respond after something happens,” Anderson said. “What people actually want is more investments in their neighborhood.”

Testing a challenge

Two years ago, Eddie Juarez-Perez saw an ad seeking new cadets for the Milwaukee Police Department.

“I decided to answer the call for service,” he said.

Juarez-Perez applied and passed the background check and written and physical exam. But he failed a psychological exam taken by all potential recruits.

“They said I was deemed not suitable for the position,” Juarez-Perez said.

He isn’t giving up.

“I look at being a police officer as being a public servant,” Juarez-Perez said. “I love my city and want to help people have a good quality of life here.”

Rodriguez said she’s been working to recruit more women involved in law enforcement. But some she said are unable to meet the physical requirements needed to join.

“I think that definitely is a barrier for a lot of women who don’t have upper body strength or have time to train,” she said.

MPD hosts fit camps and other support to help potential cadets meet physical and testing requirements to become an officer.

“We’re trying to give people the best opportunity to prepare and succeed,” Todd said.

For more information

The Fire and Police Commission is recruiting for its next academy cohort.

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

Help wanted: Can the Milwaukee Police Department fix its hiring problem? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Transfr, a New York company, seeks to put virtual reality technology in the hands of people who are incarcerated in Wisconsin, hoping they can overcome barriers to employment once released. 

“It’s life-changing for an individual to be able to come out of incarceration with actual career pathways,” said Ruben Gaona, executive director of My Way Out, an organization that supports people who are leaving reincarceration and one of Transfr’s local collaborators. 

“They’d be able to go out into the community and say, ‘OK, you know what: I’m not only here to get a job, I’m out here to get a career.’” 

Avoiding reincarceration

Research has found that a criminal record leads to a 50% reduction in callbacks and job offers. 

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections, among others, reports that the more likely someone with a criminal record is employed, the less likely the person is to return to incarceration. 

According to the department’s 2022 report, people who “completed vocational programming had lower rearrest, reconviction and reincarceration rates … compared to their peers who were identified as having a vocational programming need but who did not receive programming.” 

“From a personal and professional standpoint, I can tell you that a good-paying, career-supporting job is very essential to someone staying out and keeping that recidivism rate down,” said Andre Brown, employment specialist with Project RETURN, a reentry nonprofit established nearly 50 years ago.

For all the talk about pipelines into prison, Brown and his colleagues are trying to create a pipeline out of prison.

“If one can support themselves, pay their bills, take care of their family and have some fulfillment, one has no time to think of crime,” Brown said. 

Inside and outside

My Way Out provides six weeks of training and education to people inside Milwaukee County Community Reintegration Center, a county-run correctional facility. This support is designed to help people with job searches, including résumé writing and interviewing skills. 

With Transfr, Gaona and his team see an opportunity to expand their support by adding four weeks of virtual reality training for in-demand vocations, in fields such as construction, manufacturing,  hospitality and health care.

My Way Out staff also want to bring these resources to state prisons overseen by the Department of Corrections. 

“People will be able to come out (of incarceration) and take apprenticeship tests, so they’d start getting placement in apprenticeship programs and secure living-wage jobs,” said Gaona. 

Funding obstacle

Funding is the main obstacle to getting this technology into the hands of people who are incarcerated. 

The Department of Corrections does not have a budget for this type of technology but suggested that Transfr reach out to Wisconsin Workforce Development Boards, which partner with the department in reentry work, Beth Hardtke, director of communications for the Department of Corrections, said in an email. 

Ryan Leonhardt, state workforce manager for Transfr, said the company has had conversations with these boards but, for the most part, has heard that funding is not currently available from them as well.  

My Way Out applied for a grant that would help provide funding to work with Transfr, but its request was denied. 

Opportunities

Transfr offers more than 350 trainings, all 12 to 20 minutes, which teach foundational skills within various fields, Leonhardt said.

“If somebody is learning how to use calipers, they pick up calipers in the virtual environment. They set the calipers using the controls. They actually do the measurements,” said Leonhardt, explaining how Transfr users learn about this measurement tool common in engineering, metalworking and woodworking. “And then the final thing is they get step-by-step instruction from a digital coach, who then turns around and gives them an assessment.” 

Transfr also provides career explorations. Like the trainings, these are hands-on and guided by a coach but are five- to eight-minute experiences of a day in the life of a job “so people can get an idea of what it’s like,” Leonhardt said. 

Better trained workers are beneficial not just for the people getting trained but for the wider economy as well because of nationwide workforce shortages, Leonhardt said.

“Right now, the labor markets are such a way that if someone can come in and they have foundational skills … they’re going to have better chances for employment because they’re going to be able to meet their (employers’) needs right away,” he said. 

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

Virtual reality technology connects people who are incarcerated to a new type of job training is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Ray Mendoza doesn’t care who you vote for. He just wants you to vote. 

To Mendoza, 54, the right to vote is too precious to squander. That’s how the Milwaukee man feels after surrendering that right for the roughly 20 years he spent in a federal penitentiary and on probation.

“I encourage everybody, if you’re a convicted felon and you’re not on probation or parole, get out and vote. Use your voice,” Mendoza last week told a reporter outside Milwaukee’s Frank P. Zeidler Municipal Building, where he voted for the third time in his life — casting an in-person absentee ballot.

Each state sets its own process around removing and restoring voting rights following a felony conviction. Maine and Vermont are the only states that allow people to vote while still in prison. People in Florida can’t vote until completing their sentence and paying all fines and fees — a requirement some critics have likened to poll taxes that barred African Americans from voting during the Jim Crow era.

Wisconsin automatically restores voting rights after someone is “off paper,” meaning they have completed their prison sentence and time on probation or extended supervision. In a state of roughly 6 million people, that puts voting off limits for the roughly 23,000 in state prisons and more than 45,000 serving probation or extended supervision for felony convictions. 

Those figures represent just a fraction of people living with felony convictions on their criminal record.

Meanwhile, roughly 2 million people are incarcerated in jails or prisons nationwide, while about 17 million more live with a felony conviction — a status that can bar them from certain jobs, public assistance or housing. 

Mendoza regained his right to vote in 2019 after completing his prison bid and probation. But even now, voting stirs an anxiety he can’t fully shake. He feels at times as if restoration is a ruse to send him back to prison for unwittingly violating some rule.

“I’m waiting for somebody to come up and say, ‘You’re under arrest for fraudulent voting,’” he said of the back-of-mind feeling. “But I know I’m registered. I know I’m legit.” 

Nevertheless, he votes, and he urges all eligible voters to do the same, telling them: “If you don’t vote, you don’t have any right to complain.” 

Still, he recalls meeting community members who plan to sit out on Election Day, believing their vote counts for little. Mendoza’s experience helps him see things differently. 

He asks: “If your vote wasn’t important, why is that the first thing they take when they take your freedom?”

Mendoza now hopes his work and perspective will shape a more peaceful Milwaukee, where he lived before going to prison for participating in a violent crime that included charges of attempted murder and kidnapping. 

Mendoza, a Marine Corps veteran, began turning his life around even before going to prison. Just before his 1997 conviction, Mendoza publicly denounced the life of gang violence he previously embraced. When a Milwaukee police officer shot a man named James Rey Guerrero who was allegedly fleeing police, Mendoza worked with community leaders and police to calm tensions and organize a nonviolent prayer vigil.

At his sentencing hearing, family members and community leaders pleaded with the judge to show leniency, citing his work in the community, court transcripts show. 

“There were a lot of threats against Milwaukee police by gang members who were upset with what had transpired, and Ray was very instrumental in helping to kind of calm that and allow that prayer vigil in March to go on,” an employee of Milwaukee’s Social Development Commission told the judge. 

But redemption would have to wait. Mendoza was sentenced to 20 years in a federal penitentiary. 

His path to rehabilitation wasn’t a straight line. He said he spent his first 13 years in and out of solitary confinement, contemplating how to return to selling drugs without getting caught. 

 “All the way up until year 14 of my sentence, my mind said, ‘Well, I’m gonna come home and I’m gonna make a phone call and I’m gonna get a truckload of drugs and up here so I can get back to work,’” he said.

But returning to old habits, he eventually realized, would return him to prison. 

“One day I was sitting in the hole, and I just say, ‘You know, if I want to go home and stay home, I gotta change the way I think. I gotta change the way I live my life, and I gotta change the way I view everybody else and everything else around me,’” Mendoza said. “I refuse to go back to prison.”

He’s kept the promise he made to himself. After his release, Mendoza went to work as a violence interrupter, sharing his experiences and helping to head off gunfire. More recently, he began work as a restorative justice coach at The Northwest Opportunities Vocational Academy, designed for students determined to be at risk of not graduating. 

“According to (Milwaukee Public Schools), these (students) are the worst of the worst of the school system. Those are the ones that I love the most. Those are my favorites,” Mendoza said. 

He sees a version of himself in every young person he works with. For them, his message is simple: They don’t have to go through the pain and heartache he endured. They can do things differently.  

On this Election Day, the nation, including Wisconsin, faces partisan divisions so deep that some have vowed to move to another country if their preferred presidential candidate loses.

But where many see hopelessness, Mendoza sees something different.  

“I don’t think things are hopeless right now. I’ve seen hopeless,” he said.

“I see opportunity. Even with all the negativity that’s going on in our city, I still see opportunity, not for me, not for people my age, not for people in the work that I do, but for the young people.”

‘Use your voice’: Ex-incarcerated Milwaukee man cherishes regained voting rights is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

For Mariah Johnson, losing her brother to a speeding driver in 2021 is the hardest thing she’s ever endured in her life. 

“The moment my brother died, I felt like my light turned out a little bit,” said Johnson, a 30-year-old mother of two girls. “But, I also think that I went through this so I can make a difference in my city, take my pain of the loss of my brother and turn it into something that helps other people.”  

Johnson’s brother, Jerrold Wellinger, was driving back home with his friend, Davante Gaines, when both were killed by a driver who was racing another car down 60th Street and Hampton Avenue in Milwaukee. 

A popular TikToker, who goes by the name MariahDaWeatherBookie, Johnson is sharing her brother’s story as part of an effort by the city of Milwaukee to prevent reckless driving. 

“Speeding – We Can Live Without It” is a social media billboard and grassroots awareness campaign that aims to increase traffic safety and change driving habits in a city plagued by reckless driving. 

“These are our streets,” Johnson said. “As a community we need to come together and stop (reckless driving). We can all slow down.” 

Campaign resonates with residents

Slowing down, said Jessica Wineberg, director of the Vision Zero Initiative for the city of Milwaukee, is a surefire way to help prevent tragedies such as Johnson’s. 

“You could be that person who hits someone and changes their life forever, or you can just slow down,” she said. 

So far, according to Wineberg, the campaign is resonating with residents, with one video garnering more than 200,000 views on social media. 

Billboards featuring the campaign have also been placed at city intersections that have experienced crash-related injuries. 

Community members share their stories

Milwaukee residents who have been impacted by speeding have been sharing their messages on a social wall created as part of the campaign. 

One story was about Marcus Robinson, a father of four who was hit and killed by a speeding SUV in downtown Milwaukee on Aug. 11. 

“Marcus never made it home to his family and the driver of that (sports utility vehicle) never stopped and still has not been arrested. Now his loved ones are forced to go on without him and without having justice,” read the post. 

Another message was shared by Gloria Shaw, a woman who lost her only son, Xavier Davis, to a hit-and-run in 2022. 

“He was an amazing young man with a very bright future ahead of him in TV video production,” Shaw wrote. “We are still looking for the truck and person who hit and killed my Sonshine.” 

According to Wineberg, traffic deaths and injuries are down compared to last year.  

“Where we have changed the built environment, we are seeing less crashes,” said Wineberg, referring to the wide-scale engineering changes that have been implemented as part of the Vision Zero initiative to eliminate traffic deaths in the city. 

Jerrold’s story

Raised on Milwaukee’s North Side, Jerrold Wellinger was quite the character, said his sister.  Sometimes, Johnson said, he was the next Tony Hawk and other times a wrestler. 

“We grew up poor with a single mother, but we always rented ‘Wrestlemania,’” she said. “My brother would be flipping off the couch watching it.” 

She described him as strong-willed and not afraid to speak his mind, but like her, he had a silly side. 

“He was the one person in life that understood my personality because we both are goofy,” Johnson said. 

Turning tragedy into action

Johnson said her brother’s death led her to community work, leading chats with kids about reckless driving and conducting other outreach on the issue. She currently works with teens as a program coordinator for the PEAK Initiative.

PEAK is a year-round program that promotes leadership development for kids from first grade through high school. 

Through PEAK, Johnson has been able to help organize a block party and pop-ups, where she urges residents to think about how their driving can impact others. 

“I tell them, it’s not just speeding, it’s driving while on your phone or even just driving 10 miles over the speed limit,” she said. “We all have to be honest with ourselves and realize that we are all part of the problem, but we’re also the solution.” 

Reckless driving prevention information and resources

Learn more about the city of Milwaukee’s Vision Zero plan. 

The “Speeding – We Can Live Without It” website offers resources and information to help prevent reckless driving.

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

Milwaukee campaign aims to curb deadly reckless driving is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Marshall Jones and his wife, Jessica, have an expression they use when worries about the future threaten to overwhelm them. 

“Here is holy,” they tell each other. 

“We have to continue to be mindful of the steps that we have to take to build this life today,”  Marshall Jones said. 

As Marshall Jones, who grew up on Milwaukee’s North Side, serves two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, the way he and his wife build their today centers around faith in God and family. 

‘A bond started to be built’

In 2019, Marshall was incarcerated at New Lisbon Correctional Institution in Dodge County, about 15 years into his sentence, when he met Jessica Christensen, the prison’s new recreational leader. 

He was assigned to be one of her workers. 

“Then, being a normal human being, I stuck my hand out to shake his hand … and he threw his hands up and said, ‘I can’t touch you,’” Jessica said. 

Initially offended, she learned that he was looking out for her. 

Had they touched, she would’ve been written up for inappropriate contact, which the Wisconsin Department of Corrections explicitly regulates.

“I just saw in that moment that a narrative can be painted about a simple handshake … ,” Marshall said. “From that point, a bond started to be built.” 

From acquaintance to fellowship

At New Lisbon, Jessica oversaw recreation, including exercise programs and athletic tournaments. 

“I did anything that was active to get them off their sedentary lifestyle,” Jessica said. 

The effects on the men were not merely physical, she said. 

“You’re in there and you’re constantly thinking, ‘What did I do? I’m worthless, and there’s nothing good about me,’” Jessica said. “But you know, these guys started to feel better about themselves. ” 

Eventually, Marshall began working more directly within recreational programming. 

“I noticed he was a leader,” Jessica said. “He was all about helping the men around him.” 

The professional relationship had an extra element. 

“We learned we were brother and sister in Christ. So, there was a different level of conversation that we would have,” Jessica said. “It wasn’t crossing boundaries, it was sharing what we were learning about our faith.”

After New Lisbon

After six months, Jessica was let go from New Lisbon for, she was told, not meeting probationary standards. 

“I loved impacting the men that were incarcerated and humanizing them,” she said. “And I knew I couldn’t do that anymore.” 

But something unexpected happened as she was leaving the prison. 

“I remember walking away from the institution, and I audibly heard in my ear, ‘Write to him.’ And I believe with all my heart that it was the Holy Spirit telling me to write Marshall Jones,” Jessica said. 

That same day, they began corresponding. 

“And it just developed into this beautiful relationship,” Jessica said. “ It’s amazing because we’ve gotten to experience every level of relationship with each other – a professional relationship and then a friendship and then a relationship and, now, a marriage.”

Marshall said he was not expecting this transformation.

“I didn’t want to be in a relationship, to be honest with you,” he said. “I got crashed and burned so many times that I didn’t want no part of it.” 

They cannot pinpoint a specific moment things changed because it all happened organically, said Jessica. 

Marshall proposed three times – by letter, phone and, finally, in person. 

Her family supports the marriage, she said, and her kids see Marshall as their stepfather. 

“My mom has completely changed in this relationship,” said Falicia Jones, Jessica’s daughter. 

“Marshall really knows how to just settle her down and bring a calmness over her life in a way that I’ve never seen,” she said. 

‘The unseen of believing’

Marshall and Jessica married on Nov. 1, 2022, in commemoration of Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” 

“That truly is our marriage,” Jessica said. “You know, the unseen of believing that my husband is going to come home and that I’m going to share a life with him.” 

“Based on his circumstances, his attitude and frame of mind are pretty amazing,” added Andrew Reavis, Jessica’s brother. “Just knowing that he may never get out, and just the positivity he has and the moving forward and the faith he has that he is going to get out despite what the state says.”  

Marshall and Jessica still put their faith at the center of their thinking regarding a release date. 

“God doesn’t make mistakes, and he doesn’t put people together for no reason whatsoever,” Marshall said. 

“We’ve entrusted our faith to God that he’s going to absolutely free me from this. But no matter where we go, and what problems we address, we still deal with today,” he said. 

“Here is holy,” he said. 

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

What does marriage look like while incarcerated? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Sebastian Florentino, 14, was shot and killed on Jan. 21, 2023.

Alijah S. Golden-Richmond, also 14, was shot and killed this year on Aug. 14.

The boys were the first and last of 40 homicide victims in Milwaukee County 17 years of age or younger since Jan. 1, 2023, according to data provided by Karen Domagalski, operations manager for the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Minors represent 13% of all homicide victims in Milwaukee County since 2023.

(Milwaukee County homicide data differs from city of Milwaukee homicide data. County data includes cases from Milwaukee suburbs such as West Allis and Cudahy and also homicides determined to be justified by the District Attorney’s Office, according to Domagalski.)

“It is a sad statistic to hear how many murders there are of the young people in our city, but it also isn’t surprising to me since Milwaukee doesn’t care about our youth,” said Kevin Sas-Perez, who has worked as a youth pastor and with youths through various organizations over the past 15 years.

“I believe the number one thing youth are looking for is to be loved and to belong, but we’re not doing a good job of meeting that or any other needs for our youth.”

Lennia Fields, a mother who lived and worked in Milwaukee but currently resides in Las Vegas, also believes youths need more support to prevent them from becoming victims of violence.

“Our youth need more positive role models and programs that can shield and protect them from their environment and themselves,” said Fields, who lost her mother to homicide in 2000. “Therapy for their traumas should be provided at the school or neighborhood centers.”

Keeping guns out of the hands of youths

Of the 40 youth homicide victims since 2023, all but three died from gun violence. Many were shot and killed by other teens.

Anneliese Dickman is a senior manager for Brady, an organization that advocates against and provides solutions to gun violence.  She said the guns should never have gotten into a minor’s hands.

“Somewhere along the line there are adults who, mistakenly or purposely, allowed access to a gun, and that is 100% preventable,” Dickman said. “That’s where adults have failed.”

National trends in youth homicides

According to a 2023 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, homicide is the leading cause of death of children in the U.S.

The study, which examined national data on child homicides from 1999 to 2020, found that the age-adjusted homicide rate for children from 0 to 17 years old was 2.8 per 100,000 children in 2020 and that males were disproportionately impacted.

In Milwaukee County, the population was estimated at around 916,000, with between 19.5% and 26% being under the age of 18, according to the U.S. Census Bureau Data.

That would place Milwaukee County’s age-adjusted homicide rate for 2023 at between 10.8 and 14.6 victims per 100,000 children, much higher than the national average; 85% of youth homicide victims in Milwaukee County were males.

What can the community do?

Tracey Anderson, a Milwaukee father of seven, said the community should focus on the parents of the teens who are committing violent crimes.

“The community needs more accountability from the parents who made these wayward juveniles,” Anderson said.

Unfortunately, he said, too many parents lack the skills to raise children or even live responsibly themselves.

“Some parents are even worse than their kids, so obviously we know what direction they’re headed,” Anderson said. 

Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman recently issued a “call to action” to parents and others to become more involved in helping reduce youth violence.

“We need you at the table. Our youth need you at the table. Be a part of the solution,” he said. “What are you doing to help?”

Parents responded with ideas of their own.

“We can do all we want, but there has to be consequences that mean something,” said South Side mother Jamie Berta Gilane.

Investing in our youths

Sas-Perez, who has been involved with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee, Milwaukee Recreation and other local programs that serve youths, said that for things to change in Milwaukee, there has to be much more investment in young people, both personally and financially.

“Spend more time talking to and listening to our youth, and when they are telling us what they want and need, we should take it seriously and then put our money into creatively meeting the wants and needs,” Sas-Perez said.

“Having more robust youth programming, increased investment in our schools and better pay for those working with youth is the start of helping decrease the number of youth murdered.”

Youth violence prevention resources in Milwaukee

Project Ujima

Phone: 414-266-2557

What it does: Project Ujima is a community program that helps victims of violence and provides services at Children’s Wisconsin, your home and the community.

414 LIFE MKE

Phone: 414-439-5525

What it does: 414 Life is a violence interruption team based in Milwaukee. Its goals are to stop the spread of gun violence through de-escalation and mediation of conflicts and educating the public to change the norms around gun violence.

Credible Messenger Program

Phone: 414-257-7721

What it does: The goal of Credible Messenger’s transformative mentoring is to provide prevention and intervention with youth, keeping them from both entering the youth justice system and having deeper involvement with the youth justice system.

Office of Community Wellness and Safety

Phone: 414-286-5468

What it does: The office supports various violence prevention initiatives in the city of Milwaukee.

Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee

Phone: 414-267-8100

Address: 1558 N. 6th St. 

What it does: The organization serves thousands of youths daily in Milwaukee through a variety of academic and recreational programming.

Kids Matter Inc. 

Phone: 414-344-1220

Address: 1850 N. MLK Jr Drive #202

What it does: The organization helps abused and neglected children heal and thrive while also providing support to foster and kinship children to help prevent further child abuse. 

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

Gun violence takes deadly toll on Milwaukee County youths is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This article was first published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

Michael Bell Sr. has believed for years that Kenosha police officers victimized his family — first by killing his son in 2004 and then, he alleges, by covering up what really happened.

Bell initially accepted the police accounts of the shooting, then became skeptical and finally angry. He channeled that anger into action. He sued the city of Kenosha, its police department and four officers, resulting in a $1.75 million settlement, and took a leading role in passage of a state law that bars police departments from investigating themselves. This article was published in partnership with Wisconsin Public Radio.

But no one in the Kenosha department has admitted wrongdoing or, Bell says, adequately explained how his son ended up shot.

At the suggestion of the governor’s office, he filed a claim with the Wisconsin Crime Victims Rights Board in 2022 contending that he’s been the victim of a long-running official cover-up of his son’s killing. The board is a five-member agency that can issue public or private reprimands to public employees who violate the rights of crime victims.

The victims rights board ruled last November that if there was a cover-up, the victim wasn’t Bell, but rather the state of Wisconsin.

“The alleged conduct is against the government and its administration, not against individual persons,” said the decision, which didn’t detail how the state was victimized.

Jennifer Dunn, the board chair, declined to discuss the board’s decision. The ruling troubled some victims advocates, who termed it a departure from the intent of the victims’ rights movement.

“This is so counter to the purpose and the point of victims’ rights,” said Lenore Anderson, former prosecutor and author of “In Their Names: The Untold Story of Victims’ Rights, Mass Incarceration, and the Future of Public Safety.” She said she’d never seen a ruling that labeled the government a crime victim.

The victims’ rights movement started in the 1970s because crime victims felt invisible or ignored in the criminal process, she said. Crime victims won the right to information about cases, the right to speak at sentencing or parole hearings and other rights.

“It would be impossible to interpret any of those rights as applying to the state,” Anderson said.

Bell is appealing the board’s decision.

Bell’s appeal is unusual. Few crime victims appeal alleged violations because most lack resources, said Mariam El-menshawi, a professor at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law who specializes in victims’ rights.

In general, laws grant crime victims access to the criminal process but not control over prosecutorial decisions.

“Victims don’t get a veto,” El-menshawi said. “They can’t force an investigation.”

The Kenosha police declined comment for this story. So did Kenosha’s current district attorney and the state attorney general.

Shortly after 2 a.m. on Nov. 9, 2004, Kenosha police confronted 21-year-old Michael Bell Jr. after he parked in front of his house. Police said he was intoxicated and uncooperative. A struggle ensued in the yard and moved to the driveway. His mother and sister came outside in their bathrobes. Police shocked Bell with a Taser three times. As they held him down on the hood of a car, an officer screamed that Bell had grabbed his gun; another officer then shot Bell point-blank in the head.

It took two days for the police to declare the shooting justified. Then-District Attorney Robert Jambois followed suit 12 days later, placing the blame squarely on Bell.

He said the young man had been driving drunk, then failed to comply with the officers’ commands and chose to fight. His report described a life-and-death fight over an officer’s gun, with Bell trying to draw the weapon while the officer struggled to keep the gun in the holster.

The prosecutor concluded the police feared for their lives.

Bell Sr., a retired lieutenant colonel who piloted planes in three wars, trusted the judgment of the law enforcement agencies at first.

He wore an Air Force uniform for 24 years and was unabashedly pro-cop, he said, until he ran into what he calls a blue wall of lies and cover-up. “I was so pro-uniform there was no way that I could believe that somebody who wore a uniform could behave like that.”

Bell didn’t even believe his daughter or Michael’s mother, who watched their son get killed. But during months of family counseling, Bell grew skeptical of the police.

“When describing in detail what they saw, I realized they’re not making this up,” he said.

Bell sued Kenosha and its police department in 2005. The lawsuit pried out damaging evidence.

Police described an exhausting struggle over a gun, yet tests found no trace of Bell’s DNA on the weapon.

And the officers’ accounts contradicted a core fact: the bullet’s entrance and exit wounds in Bell Jr.’s head. The police said the struggle took place on the left side of a car in the driveway. One officer had his arms around Bell, pressing him against the hood. A second officer screamed that Bell had grabbed his gun. A third officer at the front of the car shot Bell point-blank in the left side of his head.

But the autopsy showed the bullet entered Bell’s skull just above his right ear, leaving soot and a muzzle burn, and exited on his left side, creating a bloody trail down the hood to where the officer said he was standing.

Bell said the evidence shows the shooting officer was standing between the other two officers when he fired.

“The matter of life and death goes away immediately when an officer steps between the suspect being held down and the officer claiming he has my gun,” Bell said. “You move the hand, you don’t kill the person.”

After this discrepancy was exposed in sworn pretrial testimony, the police came up with a different scenario to fit the bullet wound, and then a third. Both scenarios kept the shooter at the front of the car. The medical examiner who performed the autopsy called them “forensically impossible.”

In 2010, the city of Kenosha settled the case for $1.75 million. Bell plowed the money into activism. He put up billboards and bought full-page ads in The New York Times. He championed a 2014 law forbidding police from investigating themselves. In February of this year, he offered to donate $200,000 to a Kenosha charity if the city would let an independent ballistics expert examine the bullet; he withdrew the offer on Sept. 16 after the city declined. He helped sponsor a conference arguing that police shootings should be examined as the National Transportation Safety Board investigates plane crashes, to ascertain the facts to prevent future shootings.

After the settlement, Bell found an unlikely ally: Retired Detective Russell Beckman, who had served 28 years with the Kenosha Police. He called Bell, told him the police were acting shady and offered to volunteer with whatever Bell needed.

In 2012, Beckman put together compelling evidence that Bell Jr. never grabbed the officer’s gun. First, Bell’s DNA was not on the gun. But the key was the driver’s side mirror, which was broken and dangling from the car after the fight. Beckman said the officer caught his holstered gun on the mirror, which pulled his gun belt to the front of his body.

Jambois, the former prosecutor, said in a recent interview that the mirror may explain why the officer screamed that young Bell had his gun.

Regardless, Jambois said the shooting was still justified, whether or not Bell Jr. had his hand on the gun. The officers feared for their lives.

Michael Bell Sr. might very well feel like he’s a victim, Jambois said.

“Who cannot sympathize with a man who’s lost his son?” he said. “I can understand how he’d be so terribly, terribly unhappy and angry.”

November will mark the 20th anniversary of his son’s shooting. Bell never thought he would spend two decades seeking justice for his son while, he says, law enforcement investigated itself.

“It’s all about self-protection,” Bell said. “It’s like the NFL team owner and the referees are all on the same side.”

In July, a trial judge listened to arguments about Bell’s appeal of the Crime Victims Rights Board decision. He noted that no matter how he ruled, the case — and the question of who is truly the victim — is likely to go to the state court of appeals, and then to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

“I am not the final word,” he said.

A Wisconsin board says the real victim of police misconduct is … the government is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections has halted the work of a nonprofit that donated used books to prisoners for nearly 20 years, calling it necessary to prevent drugs from entering state prisons through secondhand books.

The move is drawing pushback from leaders of the nonprofit Wisconsin Books to Prisoners and prisoner rights advocates. They say the department is limiting inmates’ access to information while failing to narrow wider entry points for drugs, like prison staff. 

The used book ban comes after Wisconsin rerouted prisoner-bound mail out of state in the name of blocking drug shipments — an effort that has cost millions yet has had little visible impact on the numbers.

As they restrict books and mail shipments, Wisconsin prison officials have shared less about plans to stop prison employees from bringing in drugs. 

That’s despite last year’s launch of a federal investigation into employees suspected of smuggling contraband into Waupun Correctional Institution. Separately, multiple Wisconsin prison workers have faced charges related to drug smuggling in recent years. 

Prison officials ban used book donations

Wisconsin Books to Prisoners (WBTP), a small volunteer-run organization, has sent over 70,000 free books to state prisons since 2006.

Camy Matthay, the group’s director and co-founder, said she was alarmed in August to learn state prisons would no longer accept the group’s used books.

“The decision to bar WBTP from sending books unnecessarily restricts incarcerated peoples’ access to valuable educational resources, particularly when many facilities suffer from underfunded, outdated, or non-existent library service,” Matthay’s group wrote on social media when announcing the ban.

“We just want to send books to prisoners, that’s all,” Matthay said in an interview.

The organization inspected all books before sending to ensure they met prison “clean copy” criteria: no highlighting, underlining or marks of any kind, she said. 

In an Aug. 16 email to the nonprofit, Division of Adult Institutions Administrator Sarah Cooper wrote that her agency is not concerned with the organization itself, “but with those who would impersonate your organization for nefarious means.” 

“Bad actors” may send packages and books laced with drugs that “appear to be sent from the Child Support Agency, the IRS, the State Public Defender’s Office, the Department of Justice and individual attorneys,” she wrote.

The corrections department announced its latest ban of used books in January. Then Oshkosh Correctional Institution officials in February and March detected drugs in three shipments of books purporting to be from Wisconsin Books to Prisoners, spokesperson Beth Hardtke told reporters Monday in an email.

That was news to Matthay, she said Monday. The department never notified the group about the incidents, nor did Cooper’s August email mention them. 

Latest effort to restrict book donations 

This isn’t the first time restrictions have threatened the group’s work.  

Prison officials cited drug concerns in halting the nonprofit’s donations in 2008 before eventually agreeing to let it send only new books, following ACLU of Wisconsin intervention. In 2018, the department clarified that the nonprofit, as an approved vendor, could send used books so long as they were clean copies. It reaffirmed that decision in 2021. 

Hardtke said the latest restrictions don’t specifically target Wisconsin Books to Prisoners. They are instead part of a broader ban on all secondhand book deliveries. Prisoners may still receive new books sent directly from a publisher or retailer with a receipt, she said. 

Matthay’s group cannot keep up with demands while being limited to only new books, she said.

The policy will chill prisoners’ access to information, said Moira Marquis, a senior manager at the freedom of expression advocacy group PEN America. Marquis authored the report “Reading Between the Bars,” which detailed state book restrictions nationwide.  

Wisconsin Books to Prisoners sent donated books to inmates for free to address a specific barrier to information. Many prisoners, who in 2023 made as little as five cents per hour in jobs behind bars, cannot afford to buy new books from retailers. 

“If you’re going to limit somebody’s First Amendment rights excessively, you really should have a very strong burden of proof that not only is this necessary, but also that it’s effective,” Marquis said.

Wisconsin Watch asked the corrections department for evidence that necessitated the ban. 

“Unfortunately, in recent years individuals have repeatedly used paper, including letters and books, as a way to try to smuggle drugs into DOC institutions,” Hardtke said in an email.  

The department since 2019 has flagged 214 incidents of drugs being found on paper, representing a quarter of all 881 contraband incidents flagged during that time, according to figures Hardtke provided.  

“DOC is continuing the conversation with Wisconsin Books to Prisoners in the hopes we can come to an agreement to help fulfill the reading requests of those in our care and do so safely,” Hardtke wrote. 

Matthay in August asked the department if providing tracking information on its packages could help it verify that book shipments were indeed coming from Wisconsin Books to Prisoners. 

The department has yet to respond, she said Monday.  

Millions spent rerouting prison mail to Maryland

The corrections department’s broader efforts to restrict mail do not appear to have slowed the flow of drugs. The department counted more incident reports of drugs being found on paper (55) thus far in 2024 than it did in 2021 (49), the year it overhauled its mailing system, the figures Hardtke provided show. 

Not all incident reports flagged as drug-related turn out to actually be so, Hardtke noted, and the figures may not account for drug-related incidents logged in separate medical or conduct reports. 

In December 2021, the department began rerouting all prisoner-bound mail to Maryland, where a company called TextBehind scans each piece of mail and sends a digital copy to those incarcerated. The department has paid nearly $4 million for those services since they began, according to information Wisconsin Watch obtained through an open records request.

Some incarcerated people told Wisconsin Watch the loss of physical mail has increased their feelings of isolation. They can no longer hold the same handwritten letters and photographs their loved ones sent; photocopies aren’t the same. 

“I don’t get to smell the perfume on a letter. I don’t get the actual drawings my kid sends me. It takes away from the sentimental value of it,” said a Waupun prisoner who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.  

A range of research has shown that maintaining connections to loved ones improves the likelihood that a prisoner will reintegrate into society and avoid recidivism. 

The prisoner said the mail policy hasn’t stopped the flow of drugs into prison.

“Every day I smell weed,” he said. “They’re trying to blame us for the drugs, but if the administration doesn’t hold their staff accountable for their actions, it won’t solve the problem.”

Lockdowns don’t stop drug flow 

Wisconsin in recent years has locked down prisons, limiting inmate movement and privileges to alleviate staffing shortages. Drugs kept flowing even after in-person visits and direct mail to prisoners stopped. 

The department counted 214 total drug-related contraband incident reports in 2024, up from 142 a year earlier and 164 in 2022. 

Last year, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into a possible drug and contraband smuggling ring prompted the state to place 11 Waupun prison employees on leave. In September, a former Waupun prison employee was convicted of smuggling contraband into prisons under the guise of completing repairs.

And in October 2023, three months after state officials asked federal authorities to investigate staff-led smuggling inside Waupun’s prison, 30-year-old Tyshun Lemons was found dead from fentanyl poisoning. In June, prosecutors criminally charged nine Waupun prison workers, including the former warden, following multiple inmate deaths, including Lemons’.

At least two dozen correctional officers have been caught smuggling contraband into Wisconsin prisons since 2019, according to public records obtained by the advocacy group Ladies of SCI and shared with Wisconsin Watch. 

Wisconsin Watch is awaiting department records requested Sept. 5 detailing additional information related to recent drug incidents in its adult facilities. 

Mail restrictions scrutinized in other states

Multiple states have restricted books and mail since 2015, citing drug smuggling concerns, Marquis said. Meanwhile, prisoners have increasingly relied on electronic tablets, which have come with new limits on what they can read, Marquis said. 

Have such restrictions limited the flow of drugs in those states? Not necessarily, news reports have found. 

A Texas Tribune/Marshall Project investigation in 2021 found that curtailing mail did not curb drugs found in Texas prisons. Guards wrote up even more prisoners for drugs after the policy change. Prisoners and employees reported that staff were most responsible for smuggling drugs.

Pennsylvania’s prison officials banned physical mail in 2018 after blaming a series of staff illnesses on drugs allegedly sent by mail. But less than five years later, the number of prisoners who tested positive on random drug tests substantially increased, The Patriot News reported last year. 

Florida in 2021 stopped all paper mail from entering prisons, citing 35,000 contraband items found in mail between January 2019 and April 2021. But those represented less than 2% of all such items found in the prisons during that period, the Tampa Bay Times reported.  

Wisconsin in 2022 issued new screening requirements for people entering prisons and added metal detectors at points of entry. But one Waupun prison worker said screeners at entrances do not routinely inspect employees’ bags or lunches, allowing drugs to pass through undetected. The prison worker requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to media.

“If it were me trying to stop drugs, the first thing I would do is come up with a system where employees are screened better,” he said. 

To Rebecca Aubart, executive director of Ladies of SCI, the secondhand book ban is an example of how policies touted as safety measures harm incarcerated people. 

“To me this policy is another way DOC is blaming families and the people they incarcerate for the problems their staff can’t or won’t address,” she said. 

“It’s a false narrative that gets repeated, and when it becomes policy, the false narrative gets reinforced.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin prisons restrict books and mail to keep drugs out, but some staff still bring drugs in is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Milwaukee attorney William Sulton’s mission is to represent those considered to be the least, the last or the left behind. 

Although he has been in the news for his work with the troubled Social Development Commission and as one of the attorneys representing the family of D’Vontaye Mitchell, who died after a confrontation at the downtown Hyatt Regency, Sulton serves in various legal and board leadership roles in Milwaukee. 

“I just try to do what I can do that’s the right thing and use the legal tools that I have available to me,” he said. “But they’re often difficult problems.”

Sulton estimates that he spends a third of his time running his law practice, The Sulton Law Firm, 2745 N. Dr. Martin Luther King Drive, which specializes in civil rights and public interest cases.  

He devotes another third of his time to volunteering, which includes serving as the board president of the ACLU of Wisconsin. He is the legal redress chair of the NAACP Milwaukee Branch and director of the Honorable Lloyd A. Barbee Foundation, which is named for the late activist lawyer and state legislator who fought for school desegregation.

Sulton is also on the board of Convergence Resource Center, 2323 N. Mayfair Road, an anti-human trafficking nonprofit in Milwaukee.

How it all started

During his childhood, Sulton lived in Maryland, Wisconsin, Colorado and New Jersey.

His mother is from Racine and worked as a civil rights lawyer, which Sulton said had a huge impact on him and his siblings.  

“All three of us (siblings) had a really strong sense of social justice and wanting to help people, particularly racial justice issues,” said Sulton’s sister Patrice Sulton, who also is an attorney. 

She now runs DC Justice Lab, an organization focused on criminal justice reform policy. 

Sulton remembers one case in which his mom was defending Gil Webb, a Black teenager who was charged in the death of a police officer after a car crash in Denver in 1997. People called their home and left racist and threatening messages on the answering machine. 

“I remember being a little kid and riding my bike home so I could erase these messages because I didn’t want my mom to hear them,” he said.

Sulton studied political science as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University, where he started representing students in plagiarism cases. 

While attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, Sulton met his wife, Stephanie, and later moved to her hometown of Milwaukee. 

Public interest law

After finishing law school, Sulton noticed that many people in the courtroom were unrepresented because they believed lawyers were beyond their reach. 

Wisconsin ranks low in lawyers per capita and has an even smaller number of civil rights lawyers, Sulton said. 

Public interest lawyers usually represent poor, marginalized or underrepresented individuals or organizations not served by private sector law firms, including civil rights and social justice cases. 

“These cases are important,” he said. “They mean something. It’s not just about how much money can you make on a case, right? It’s about, can you really change government policy? Can you really make things better, right?” 

Sulton has gained a reputation for taking cases he says that few attorneys will take and demonstrating that they can be profitable. 

“If I had a magic wand and I could do one thing, I would shift the way that we talk about public interest work,” Sulton said. “I think the number one reason that people don’t do public interest work is they don’t think that it’s profitable.” 

Sulton also makes time to speak to law students at UW-Madison. 

One law student asked him about the traumatic weight of his cases and if it impacts him, which Sulton said he had not thought about before. 

“I think I’m just callous because it doesn’t,” Sulton said. 

The ultimate volunteer

Through his volunteer work with the NAACP, Sulton has taken on equal employment opportunity cases and helps clients understand legal problems if they are considering filing complaints, said Clarence Nicholas, president of the NAACP Milwaukee Branch.

“He has a friendly personality and he’s personable,” Nicholas said. 

Sulton started representing the Social Development Commission, also known as the SDC, in late 2022 on a volunteer basis when longtime attorney James Hall Jr. was getting ready to retire and brought him on. Hall died in early 2024.

SDC suspended operations in April, halting a variety of programs and laying off employees. Sulton is working with the SDC board to find paths forward for the agency.

“I don’t know anybody else that would do what he has done, the amount of work that we have put on him, especially in the last four months,” said Barbara Toles, chair of the SDC Board of Commissioners. 

Patrice Sulton said she doesn’t know anyone else in the legal field or elsewhere who holds as many time-consuming positions at the same time.

“I think it’s probably too much to juggle, but I also see how those things work together,” she said. 

One of Milwaukee’s unsung heroes

Sulton said he tries to work early in the morning or late at night to spend the final third of his time with his wife and four kids, ages 13, 10, 8 and 5. 

He said he likes the life he has built, and his main goal is to try to help people.

Debbie Lassiter, executive director of Convergence Resource Center, thinks Sulton is one of Milwaukee’s unsung heroes for his work in the community.

“He never makes you feel like: ‘Listen, I’m too busy to talk to you,’ ” she said. 

“You don’t hear a lot about him getting awards or people thanking him for what he’s done, but we will be forever grateful for what he did for us,” Lassiter added.

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

Attorney William Sulton advocates for Milwaukee’s most vulnerable is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

In response to what he described as increased brazenness among teens using firearms to steal property and commit other violent crimes, Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman has called on parents and others in the community to intervene.

“We need you at the table. Our youth need you at the table. Be a part of the solution,” he said. “What are you doing to help?”

Some in the community are responding to Norman’s calls to action with their own. 

Northwest Side resident Patricia Wilson said anyone who witnesses a crime, involving a youth or someone else, should step up.

But, she said, when you call the police, the department doesn’t do much. She wants more accountability.

“If a teacher has a majority of their students fail each year, the teacher is reprimanded and placed on a performance improvement plan, but the police department has hundreds of unsolved homicides every year, and their performance is never questioned,” Wilson said. 

Kiomara Avila said parents are being blamed for issues that result from raising children in an unsafe environment. She said the solution lies with safer neighborhoods, better schools and more programming for youths.

“Stop washing your hands by saying it’s an ‘at home’ problem,” Avila said.

Catherine Lyons, a retired grandmother, believes that many of the issues that people are facing with youths begin at home.

“If there are no rules at home, what makes anyone think they’ll adhere to rules outside of the home?” Lyons asked.

Consequences for youths

Jamie Berta Gilane, who was carjacked and thrown from her car by a teenager in front of her daughter in 2022, said police and prosecutors don’t do enough to discourage young people from committing crimes.

The youth who stole her car eventually crashed her vehicle into a tree, she said. He was charged as a juvenile.

“We can do all we want, but there has to be consequences that mean something,” Gilane said.

Norman addressed the criminal justice system in his statement, saying that once an arrest is made and evidence is presented, the consequences are out of the police department’s hands.

“From our end, these consequences are not changing our youth’s behavior,” he said. “The kids we are arresting are reoffending. The community must intervene.”

Investing in young people

Amanda Avalos is co-executive director of Leaders Igniting Transformation, or LIT, which organizes young people behind issues that relate to social, racial and economic justice.

She said arresting and locking people up doesn’t make the community safer. 

“Research shows that the safest communities are those where people have access to quality education, affordable housing and health care, economic opportunity, and shared public spaces,” Avalos said.

“In addition to asking what individuals can do to address these problems, Chief Norman should ask our elected officials to invest in what all young people in Milwaukee need to thrive in our society.”

‘Be present’

Michele Bria, chief executive officer for Journey House, a South Side organization that provides arts, academics, athletics and workforce development opportunities for youths and families, said she appreciated Norman’s call to action and openness to collaboration.

She wants residents and others to become more involved with local youths.

“Be present for our youth and listen to their aspirations and dreams. Help guide our young people to be all that they can be,” Bria said.

Bridget Whitaker, executive director of Safe & Sound, an organization that works with law enforcement, residents and others to increase safety, said she felt sincerity in Norman’s plea for help.

She wants the community to move away from an “it’s not my problem” mindset.

“I am a firm believer that the youth that end up in news headlines about a stolen vehicle or violent situation is a child that was left behind – a child that was not provided with the love and affection to believe that they mattered,” Whitaker said.

Whitaker said her organization is working to reduce youth violence using various strategies, including a six-week series that engages young people on issues such as gun, family and dating violence.

“MPD cannot end violence alone, and (Chief Norman’s statement) highlights the urgent need for more people to get involved and inquire about how we can best support,” she said. 

James Lair, a Milwaukee father of four, agreed.

“Cops can’t do it all,” he said. “Teachers, families, parents, the whole neighborhood need to help raise these kids.”

He said when he grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, neighborhoods were safer because everyone looked out for young people.

“Now everyone feels like ‘it’s not my problem,’ until something happens to them or their family,” he said.

A version of this story was originally published by Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

Milwaukee weighs in on how to decrease youth violence is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin has agreed to make a series of reforms meant to ensure that residents who speak little or no English can get the services they need.

The agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice resolves a civil rights inquiry that followed ProPublica reporting last year on how the sheriff’s office had mistakenly blamed an immigrant worker for his son’s 2019 death on a dairy farm. The reporting revealed that a language barrier between the worker and a sheriff’s deputy had led to the misunderstanding.

Under the Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal funding, such as the sheriff’s office in Dane County, cannot discriminate against people because of their country of origin or ability to speak English. The Justice Department said that there was no finding of discrimination against the sheriff’s office and that it “fully cooperated” with the inquiry.

As part of the agreement, which was signed over the past week, Dane County says it will finalize a language access policy that includes staff training, quality controls and outreach initiatives and will undergo a period of departmental monitoring. The new policy — which has been in progress for months — will set standards on when deputies can use children, bystanders and tools such as Google Translate to communicate with non-English speakers. It also creates a process to ensure that, after an emergency situation is over, deputies can confirm the accuracy of information that was gathered via unqualified interpreters.

José María Rodríguez Uriarte, the father of the dead boy, said he was relieved to learn of the agreement.

“I think this will really put pressure on police to obtain clearer translations when they can’t understand a person,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “A lot of us get into a panic when we’re pulled over by the police or when something happens because of the language issue; we don’t know if officers are truly there to help us or, on the contrary, to harm us. So this is a good thing.”

ProPublica’s reporting had found that a different worker had accidentally killed Rodríguez’s son, a precocious 8-year-old named Jefferson. That worker told ProPublica that it was his first day on the job and that he’d received little training before operating a skid steer, a large piece of equipment used on the farm to scrape up cow manure; he said he wasn’t aware the boy was behind him when he put the machine in reverse.

Deputies never interviewed the man, who like the boy’s father was a recent immigrant from Nicaragua and didn’t speak English. A deputy on the scene who considered herself proficient in Spanish interviewed Rodríguez, but she made a grammatical mistake that led her to misunderstand his account of what actually happened.

In a statement, Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said his office is committed to equality and inclusion. “By proactively addressing language barriers, we are fostering a more connected community where everyone can fully participate,” he said. Last week, the department posted a page on its website about its efforts to improve language access and included the material in six languages, including English, Spanish and Hmong.

The agreement is part of a Justice Department initiative intended to help law enforcement agencies overcome language barriers to better serve communities and keep officers safe.

“To serve and protect all communities in the United States, our state and local law enforcement agencies must be able to communicate effectively with crime victims, witnesses, and other members of the public who do not speak fluent English,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.

The story of what happened to Jefferson brought unprecedented attention to the plight of the mostly undocumented immigrant workers who milk cows and shovel manure in America’s Dairyland. Local and state officials began calling for reforms. In the months after ProPublica’s investigation was published, county officials allocated $8 million to create new housing for farmworkers and established a countywide coordinator position to help all departments implement language access plans and engage community members with limited English proficiency. Jefferson’s parents also reached a settlement with the farm where he died and its insurance company, neither of which admitted wrongdoing. The case had been scheduled for trial but was resolved weeks after the story was published.

Since his son’s death, Rodríguez has been working on another dairy farm in the area. He said he hopes to return to Nicaragua in December to be reunited with his remaining son, Jefferson’s younger brother, Yefari. The boy is now one year older than Jefferson was when he died.

DOJ reaches agreement with Wisconsin sheriff’s office to improve services for people who don’t speak English is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

An inmate found dead at a maximum-security prison in northeastern Wisconsin was strangled, investigators said Thursday.

Brown County Sheriff’s Office deputies and medical personnel were called to the Green Bay Correctional Institution on Tuesday evening for a report of a pulseless inmate who wasn’t breathing. They found 19-year-old Micah Laureano dead at the scene. It’s unclear exactly where in the prison Laureano was found.

The sheriff’s office said that an initial investigation determined that Laureano had been killed in his cell and his 24-year-old cellmate was a suspect.

The sheriff’s office said in an updated news release Thursday that an autopsy revealed Laureano had been strangled.

Laureano and the suspect had been together in the cell for only hours before his death, the sheriff’s office added. The release did not say specifically how long they had been together.

The investigation is ongoing, and charges are expected to be filed late next week, the sheriff’s office said.

Online court records indicate that Laureano was sentenced to two years in the state prison system in January for being a party to substantial battery in Waukesha County, with the first year to be served behind bars and the second on extended supervision. His attorney in that case, public defender Maura McMahon, described Laureano as a “funny, thoughtful young man and a talented artist” in an email to The Associated Press.

Laureano’s cellmate was sentenced to 40 years in the prison system in January 2018 for attempted homicide in Manitowoc County, with 20 years to be served behind bars and 20 years on extended supervision. The cellmate was 18 years old when he was sentenced.

Asked for comment on the incident, state Department of Corrections spokesperson Beth Williams Hardtke responded with an email acknowledging that Laureano died Tuesday after an “incident in his cell.” She said no staff members were hurt, and law enforcement was investigating. The prison was operating normally with all scheduled activities continuing as usual, she said.

Laureano’s death is another blow for the Department of Corrections as it struggles to protect inmates and prison workers in the face of aging facilities and chronic staffing shortages.

Five inmates at the maximum-security Waupun Correctional Institution have died since June 2023. Two killed themselves, one died of a fentanyl overdose, one died of a stroke, and one died of malnutrition and dehydration. Prosecutors charged the prison’s former warden, Randall Hepp, and eight other Waupun staff members this past June with misconduct in connection with the stroke and malnutrition deaths.

Men held at Waupun have filed a class action lawsuit alleging mistreatment, including not having access to health care. And the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating a possible smuggling ring at the prison.

Just weeks after the charges came down against Hepp and his staffers at Waupun, Corey Proulx, a counselor at the state’s youth prison outside Irma, died after a 16-year-old inmate punched him in the face. His death sparked calls from the facility’s staff and Republican legislators to lift a court-imposed ban on pepper spray. The federal judge who imposed the prohibition in 2018 has so far refused to consider their requests.

Waupun opened in 1854. Green Bay Correctional Institution opened in 1898. Republicans have been calling for years to close both prisons, saying they’ve outlived their usefulness. But concerns over job losses in the communities and the cost of building a new prison, estimated at as much as $1 billion, have proven to be stumbling blocks. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has tried to address the prison system’s problems by giving guards raises.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Autopsy determines man killed at Green Bay Correctional Institution was strangled is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin lawmakers have offered few remedies for deteriorating prison conditions spotlighted this year by investigative journalism, litigation surrounding extended lockdowns and criminal charges against nine Waupun prison officials following a string of inmate deaths.

But prisoner rights advocates remain energized by the recent attention. They are calling for the creation of an independent ombudsman to investigate concerns inside prisons and to study solutions.

Experts say such an office, versions of which exist in 19 states and the District of Columbia, could improve safety. Allowing prisoners and their families to air grievances could decrease tension that fuels violence between guards and inmates. And independent monitoring could prevent neglect and abuse — limiting tax dollars paid out in lawsuits, advocates say. 

Between 2013 and 2023, Wisconsin paid out at least $17 million in 450 legal settlements to people alleging abuse, neglect or civil rights violations while incarcerated, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of settlement data. The cases involved alleged failure to prevent self-harm, deliberate indifference to medical needs and reckless disregard for the safety of prisoners, among other complaints. As a matter of practice, the state typically admitted no fault in its settlement agreements. 

The Wisconsin Watch analysis does not include more than $25 million in settlements and legal fees related to allegations of abuse at Wisconsin’s only youth prison at Lincoln Hills-Copper Lake, including excessive pepper spray use, strip searches and restraints. A counselor was killed this summer in a fight at the prison.  

Prisoners and advocates say they have nowhere to turn outside of courts for an impartial review of complaints.

While concerned family members can write to the Department of Corrections, their letters often get ignored or routed to prison staff who may retaliate — for instance by writing up the prisoner in question or reducing privileges like family visitation, Rebecca Aubart said. She’s the executive director of Ladies of SCI, a statewide advocacy group that initially focused on prisoners and loved ones at the medium-security Stanley Correctional Institution. 

“What’s going to happen is that it’s going to eventually end up in front of the warden, and nothing will be done about it,” Aubart told Wisconsin Watch.

Creating an ombudsman office, she said, “would give family members a place to go, and it would be kept confidential. We wouldn’t be experiencing the retaliation that we do now.” 

Aubart and other advocates brought the idea to the Republican-controlled Assembly’s Committee on Corrections during a July hearing. Lawmakers signaled openness to the idea.  

Rep. Angie Sapik, R-Lake Nebagamon, said she had previously considered writing a bill. Rep. Darrin Madison of Milwaukee said he and fellow Democrats have worked on their own proposal.

Aubart asked lawmakers to work together. 

“One side cannot fix it,” she said. 

Department of Corrections spokesperson Beth Hardtke said the agency is reviewing the idea, but cautioned a new office would require funding and staff resources.

“We would also note that DOC does have a complaint system, including an appeals process, for individuals in our care,” Hardtke added. “We also regularly offer guidance to the public, route complaints or concerns to the appropriate place, and resolve issues.” 

That complaint system is Wisconsin’s primary avenue for resolving prison grievances, with concerns submitted to and reviewed by an institution complaint examiner. Prisoner advocates call it unresponsive. Unlike an independent ombudsman, it exists completely within the Department of Corrections. Complaints first flow to staff at the prison where they originate, creating a perverse incentive to dismiss them out of hand, critics say.

Rep. Ryan Clancy, D-Milwaukee and a corrections committee member, calls it “the worst possible system.”

“We need an independent fact-finder to investigate because a system where you can be punished for speaking out is not a good one,” Clancy said. 

Independent prison oversight in other states

Lawmakers outside of Wisconsin are increasingly turning to independent prison monitors. Virginia and Maryland this year passed bipartisan bills to create ombudsman offices, as did Congress — strengthening oversight of federal prisons. 

“States and legislators around the country are starting to understand how essential this is. It’s basically what democracy and good governance is all about,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, who has extensively researched independent prison monitoring. “And that’s why these bills are passing with bipartisan support, unanimous support.”

New Jersey and Washington state represent strong models of oversight, Deitch said, giving investigators broad access to inspect facilities. Internal inspection offices can serve a purpose, she added, but they rarely share findings publicly, limiting transparency and accountability. 

Some corrections staffers who initially bristle at outside oversight end up benefiting through improved relations with prisoners and working conditions, Deitch said. 

“Oversight benefits everybody involved in the system, from incarcerated people and their families, to staff and administrators,” Deitch said.

Employees at understaffed Waupun Correctional Institution might welcome such results. The prison experienced 176 assaults on staff from June 2023 to June 2024 — more than a third of assaults systemwide, Department of Corrections data show.

One Waupun prison staff member said the many assaults and tensions from ongoing litigation at times make correctional officers reluctant to impose consequences for threatening or assaultive behavior for fear of triggering additional lawsuits or charges.

“You can’t run a prison in fear, and right now, we’re on our heels,” said the staff member, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.  

How Minnesota does it

Wisconsin can look to its neighbor for one oversight model.

In the early 1970s, in the wake of one of the country’s bloodiest prison riots in Attica, New York, problems brewed at Minnesota’s Stillwater prison, which saw uprisings, escape attempts, murders and a violent attack on the warden. In 1970, armed inmates took three officers hostage and tried to walk out wearing their uniforms. The prisoners gave up after listing their grievances to a reporter.

Two years later Minnesota created its ombuds office to address grievances before hostilities spiraled into violence. 

The office was defunded in 2002 and closed the following year, but it reopened in 2019 after the deaths of two correctional officers, said Margaret Zadra, the state’s ombudsperson for corrections. 

“A lot of people at the time were talking about the office as a pressure release valve,” Zadra said. “But we tend to talk about our office more like a flashlight. We shine a light on issues, and we can go behind the walls and see things that most people don’t have access to and can’t see.”

Although Minnesota and Wisconsin have roughly the same demographics and population, their corrections systems look dramatically different. Wisconsin locks up more than 22,000 people in adult prisons, more than twice as many as Minnesota.

Minnesota, as a result, spends proportionately less on corrections than Wisconsin: $111 per state resident in 2020, compared to Wisconsin’s $220, according to a Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis. 

Minnesota’s Office of the Ombuds for Corrections employs five staff members and plans to add three more. It oversees 11 prisons and 150 jails statewide and has a budget of $1.3 million. The office is independent from the state’s corrections department and reports to the governor. 

Minnesota’s ombuds fields complaints from prisoners, staff and community members and holds office hours at correctional facilities. It lacks enforcement powers but presents recommendations to the Department of Corrections and Legislature. The office helps those incarcerated resolve individual problems and advocates for systemic change after diagnosing larger problems, Zadra said.

Since 2020 the office has produced recommendations for improving use of force policies, unsafe practices when transporting prisoners and crumbling conditions within state prisons. Several recommendations have prompted legislative action, including creating a body-worn camera pilot project for correctional officers.

Costly complaints

Wisconsin prisoners who believe their rights have been violated can sue the Department of Corrections, but only after exhausting every step of the internal grievance process.   

Missing a step or deadline can trigger a case’s dismissal. 

That happened in May when a federal judge dismissed eight of 10 plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging cruel and unusual punishment at Waupun’s prison. U.S. Magistrate Judge William Duffin ruled the eight incarcerated men failed to exhaust administrative remedies before suing. 

Lonnie Story, who represents the inmates, told Wisconsin Watch he plans to refile the case. 

Reliance on internal complaint systems stems from the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act of 1996, which Congress enacted to stem the tide of “frivolous” lawsuits. Legal scholars and prisoner rights advocates say the law created barriers to resolving grievances — aside from prompting more case dismissals. 

For instance it capped attorney fees plaintiffs’ attorneys can win, making it harder for prisoners to find representation.

Many prisoners represent themselves in lawsuits, and some win — evidenced by the 450 settlements over prison allegations from 2013 to 2023. 

Of the $17 million paid out in those lawsuits, $5 million went to the family of James Black. The family’s 2014 lawsuit alleged correctional officers ignored Black’s requests to be moved out of a cell he shared with an inmate known for sexually predatory and violent behavior. The prisoner later violently raped Black and stomped on his head, leaving him with severe and permanent brain damage that required 24-hour supervision, according to the suit.

Another $175,000 went to a Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility prisoner who was harassed and sexually assaulted by former correctional officer Paul Vick Jr., who later received a prison sentence for sexually assaulting inmates and misconduct in office. 

Improving prison conditions at the complaint stage might save the state money by reducing lawsuits, Deitch said, adding that critics counter that added scrutiny would expose more problems that festered in secret, perhaps at least initially increasing lawsuits. 

“It could cut either way,” said Deitch. “But the reality is, if you clean up what’s going on inside prisons, of course, you’re going to reduce the number of lawsuits.” 

Minnesota’s ombuds office operates parallel to the internal correction department grievance system. Investigators encourage prisoners to follow the internal complaint process ahead of an ombuds investigation. 

Little progress

The push for increased scrutiny over Wisconsin prisons follows months of lawmaker inaction. 

In November, months after Wisconsin Watch and the New York Times exposed worsening conditions and extended lockdowns at Waupun’s prison, Democratic lawmakers called a press conference to unveil  17 bills that they said would improve transparency, oversight and conditions of confinement. The bills did not advance in the Republican-controlled Legislature. 

Speaking at the July hearing, Rep. Michael Schraa, R-Oshkosh, the outgoing Assembly Committee on Corrections chair, said he may have supported some bills had Democrats sought his input before the press conference. 

“You guys went in front of the TV cameras. You took your five minutes of fame. You never came to any member on this committee, on the Republican side, and worked with any of us,” Schraa said. “That’s not the way that things work here. The majority party brings these bills forward, and if they’re bipartisan bills, they get hearings.”

Clancy, the Milwaukee Democrat, disputed that account. Email correspondence he shared with Wisconsin Watch showed he contacted Schraa’s office about the bills weeks before the press conference. Schraa’s office canceled the meeting before it took place, Clancy said. Through an aide, Schraa declined to be interviewed for this story. Schraa lost his reelection bid in a Republican primary earlier this month.

Entrenched partisanship has fueled gamesmanship that prevents lawmakers from solving problems, Clancy said.  

“It’s just a really toxic environment of them not wanting to give us, as Dems, a win.” 

Legislative stalemates left chronic prison staffing shortages unaddressed for years. While DOC officials warned of a looming staffing crisis nearly a decade ago, the Legislature took no meaningful action to hire and retain correctional staff until 2023 — after the prisons began locking down due to a lack of staff to fully operate. 

DOC has since filled vacancies in some prisons. The systemwide vacancy rate for correctional staff and officers as of Aug. 28 sits at 12%, down from its 35% peak in August 2023. The vacancy rate at Waupun still remained above 41%, higher than any other prison. 

Madison, the Milwaukee Democrat, recalled seeing a stack of letters from incarcerated people during his first day in office. The letters detailed problems Madison saw evidence of while touring prisons as a member of the Assembly corrections committee. 

“If an office of ombudsman existed, those complaints would fall on them instead of an internal system, which is not a good model of accountability anyway,” Madison said. “We’d likely see more results in changing practices within facilities if it was independent of administration.”

Douglas Duncan contributed research for this story.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Short on fixes for prison problems, Wisconsin weighs independent oversight is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Deadly police encounters in Wisconsin were up last year and are on track this year to exceed the modern record of 26 deaths set in 2017.

The increase comes after Wisconsin Watch and The Badger Project reported two years ago that Wisconsin’s rate of police killings ranked among the lowest in the nation over the past decade. In the past two years the rate has risen, particularly compared with neighboring states.

There were at least 24 fatal encounters last year, up from 14 the previous year. So far the number of deaths this year is at least 19, according to a Wisconsin Watch review. That outpaces Illinois, which has more than twice the population. Experts cannot pinpoint one specific cause behind the increase.

Wisconsin Watch conducted its own count of fatal use-of-force incidents because the state Department of Justice’s tracking falls short and is updated only four times a year. The department’s use-of-force tally does not reflect police incidents involving restraints, “non-lethal” force and confrontations that ended in suicide.

Wisconsin Watch also found cases in which law enforcement violated its own de-escalation protocols and resorted to deadly force in ways that experts say contradict long-established best practices — all with little accountability. 

In at least one death last year, authorities used a medically discredited condition that still appears in state training materials to justify forcibly restraining someone during a struggle.

Tracking every police killing or injury remains difficult, and efforts to tighten oversight and accountability have largely stalled in the state Legislature.

Local district attorneys have determined virtually every police use-of-force case was justified. But the increased frequency of fatal encounters has prompted law enforcement accountability advocates to call for more state oversight.

“Oftentimes the DA looks at just that immediate piece where the officer felt their life was in danger,” said Amy Watson, a mental health researcher at Wayne State University who has studied fatal police encounters, “but doesn’t usually consider the steps before that created that situation.”

Russell Beckman, a retired Kenosha detective turned policing reform activist, said he fears police killings now carry less stigma and that the legal system allows officer safety to trump public safety.

“A shoot can be legal — justified — a legal justified shoot,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it was necessary.” 

The state’s largest police union doesn’t dispute the rising death count but says police are mostly responding to people who are armed or thought to be armed — threatening officers or bystanders.

“I don’t think there is a good explanation,” said Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association. 

“What we’ve seen over the last several years is an increased proportion of individuals that are involved in fatal police encounters that confront officers with a weapon — whether it’s a firearm, or a knife, or a sword or an edged weapon.”

Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul gave a similar response when asked about the recent increase, calling it “most significantly related to the number of incidents in which force needs to be used because of the circumstances.”

Wisconsin Watch’s count of at least 19 fatal encounters matches figures from Mapping Police Violence, a research collaborative that has tracked such data since 2013. Over that 11-year time frame about three in four fatal encounters in Wisconsin involved a subject with an alleged weapon, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of the collaborative’s data.

But since the pandemic the percentage of cases involving a weapon has been lower than in neighboring states, while the percentage involving a mental health crisis has increased, the analysis found.

The data include deaths DOJ has not tracked as caused by police use of force. Some subjects killed were unarmed, and some fatalities were not shootings, leading the coroner to classify the death as accidental, allowing police and first responders to escape deeper scrutiny.

“There’s been a lot of concern about medical examiners and coroners classifying deaths in custody as accidental and downplaying the potential role of the various interventions that were undertaken prior to the death,” said Dr. Paul Applebaum, Columbia University professor of psychiatry, medicine and law.

‘I’m in fear of my life’

When responding officers tased and then sat on a handcuffed 26-year-old Kaukauna man suspected of killing his wife last October, he told officers: “I’m in fear of my life.”

An officer then sat on his back for at least six minutes as others attended to the victim in the next room. Medics injected the powerful sedative ketamine with a syringe. His breathing became labored. Once loaded into the ambulance, he was declared unresponsive with no pulse. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Police and medics likely didn’t realize their actions risked killing Eric VanSyoc, said experts who examined reports and investigatory files Wisconsin Watch obtained through public records requests.

“I suspect that their training was inadequate to warn them both about the dangers of prone restraint and about the risks associated with sedation with ketamine,” said EMS trainer Eric Jaeger, who has helped other states improve safety protocols.

Yet Outagamie County District Attorney Melinda Tempelis wrote that responding officers in Kaukauna used “an appropriate amount of force to prevent the imminent death or great bodily harm to themselves or others.”

A Kaukauna police statement on social media said VanSyoc experienced a “medical episode” but did not mention sedation or restraints that followed the tasing. The death, ruled accidental by the county coroner, does not appear in the state’s list of police use-of-force deaths.

‘You’re gonna get bit’

The majority of 2024 in-custody deaths involved shootings of suspects deemed threatening. In some cases prosecutors ruled such force justified even though officers disregarded de-escalation best practices.

The Rice Lake Police Department’s crisis intervention protocols call for attempts at de-escalation before resorting to deadly force. They instruct officers not to “argue, speak with a raised voice or use threats to obtain compliance.”

That’s not what happened last October when responding officers shot and killed Zachary Veitch, 50, in a public housing complex after fellow tenants reported he allegedly attacked one of them with a knife and then fled.

Medics had already treated the stabbing victim for injuries to her upper arm when police used a key to enter Veitch’s apartment. An officer had threatened Veitch with a barking police dog if he didn’t surrender.

“You need to come out or you’re gonna get bit!” an officer shouted from the hallway.

Veitch, who was living with a mental illness, refused and retreated into his bedroom. 

“He thought he was a prophet. That’s how far into religion he was,” his father later told Wisconsin Watch. 

Thirty seconds after officers entered the apartment and released the police dog, they forced Veitch’s bedroom door open. He lunged with a knife, and officers shot him dead in his kitchen, bodycam footage shows.

A retired police officer who reviewed the redacted investigation questioned the rush to use deadly force against a man alone in his own apartment. 

“I didn’t see that they attempted to establish any kind of a dialogue,” said John Wallschlaeger, who retired from the Appleton Police Department and has long trained Crisis Intervention Teams across Wisconsin.

Radio chatter captured on the bodycam indicates that sheriff’s deputies were bringing a riot shield to the apartment complex for the responding officers.

“They didn’t wait for the shield,” Wallschlaeger added. “Even though the shield was en route, they didn’t wait for it.” 

The Rice Lake police chief and the Barron County sheriff later announced that an unnamed use-of-force panel “made up of various law enforcement professionals” concluded the actions of a deputy and officers involved fell within the sheriff’s “department policy and procedures.” 

Its reasoning remains unclear. Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald told Wisconsin Watch their findings “were not in written form.” 

Barron County District Attorney Brian Wright ruled that officers acted reasonably and commended them for protecting themselves and other residents in the apartment complex.

“Officers were confronted with the urgency of taking Veitch into custody before he harmed anyone else,” he wrote. That contradicted the official report in which officers said they assumed he was alone in his apartment.

The suspect’s father, who surveyed his son’s blood-spattered apartment days later, said he can’t understand the officers’ tactics.

“I know he would have been able to be talked down,” Gary Veitch told Wisconsin Watch. “It may have taken a few minutes. But where were they going, you know? They had him.”

DOJ records Veitch’s death as related to use of force. But authorities have withheld the names of the police officers and sheriff’s deputy who fired their weapons. Investigators cited threats made by the dead man’s son against officers captured in recorded jailhouse phone calls following news of the fatal shooting.

Craig Futterman, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago and founder of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Clinic, said de-escalation protocols matter only when enforced. 

“Unless there are consequences for failing to de-escalate, a lot of the policies or practices or training may not be worth much,” he said.

‘I’m on drugs!’

A nationwide Associated Press investigation into more than a thousand deaths after police subdued someone with force not supposed to be lethal found it common for agencies to withhold medical records that contain evidence of potential missteps.

In Wisconsin’s Lafayette County last February at 1 a.m., an agitated man in his underwear cursed and shouted “I’m on drugs!” and fought with officers who tried to subdue him in the street.

A police officer hit Gregg Marcotte with a Taser at least twice. A ground scuffle ensued. The 44-year-old man was later found to be unresponsive in the ambulance and declared dead at the hospital.

Whether use-of-force protocols were followed is unclear. State investigators heavily censored video footage of the melee with police, Marcotte’s cause of death and the treatment he received by paramedics.

The autopsy said Marcotte likely died from a mix of a heart attack, high blood pressure, drug use, blunt chest trauma and prone restraint exacerbated by his fight with police.

“The ruling is this was an unfortunate accident,” wrote Lafayette County Coroner Linda Gebhardt.

Dr. Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist with expertise in arrest-related deaths, questioned that conclusion, saying it overly emphasized the methamphetamine in Marcotte’s system. 

“I believe this is probably a prone restraint cardiac arrest / metabolic acidosis death, and I would rule the death a homicide,” wrote Weedn, a former chief medical examiner for the state of Maryland. 

He reviewed the state Division of Criminal Investigation’s investigation and medical examiner’s reports at Wisconsin Watch’s request. He cautioned that he would need additional information, specifically the decedent’s heart rhythm, to make a more definitive ruling. 

Wisconsin a regional leader in fatal encounters

Kaul, the state’s elected top law enforcement officer, asked about the increase in fatal police encounters during a June appearance at the Appleton Police Department, said officers are operating in a state whose lax gun laws make weapons easily available. 

“Somebody can literally sell a gun out of the trunk of their car to a perfect stranger,” Kaul said.

The increase in fatal police encounters does not correspond with an increase in violent crimes. An analysis of DOJ crime data shows that violent offenses were up in 2021 but have declined each year since.

Advocates for police reform have expressed alarm at the rising death toll and transparency gaps in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin remains below the per capita national average for fatal police encounters, according to Mapping Police Violence. Even so, the state over the past decade often exceeded the rates of its neighbors. 

Illinois, with twice the population, has seen a sharp decrease in fatal police encounters with at least 16 so far this year compared with at least 19 in Wisconsin.

Advocates for police reform point to the Chicago model that in 2016 empowered the Civilian Office of Police Accountability to investigate misconduct complaints and in-custody and arrest-related deaths.

Illinois lawmakers later enacted laws to harmonize use-of-force policies, require officers to intervene if they witness excessive force and make police misconduct records easily available.

“When officers see fellow officers lose their jobs, lose money, lose pay over their failure or refusal to abide by core de-escalation policies — you change,” said Futterman, the University of Chicago law professor.

A 2021 Illinois law requires reviews of the totality of circumstances rather than the final seconds when police officers feel threatened and use deadly force.

Fatal police encounters remain a nationwide challenge with more than 1,350 deaths last year and 2024 on pace to match that amount.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened an expert panel to investigate and consider recommendations to reduce such encounters.

A 2000 federal law requires in-custody deaths to be reported to the U.S. Department of Justice. But officials with the department’s Bureau of Justice Assistance, which collects those figures, say inconsistent reporting leaves them with data too incomplete to publish frustrating efforts to fully grapple with the issue. 

‘Excited delirium’ remains on the books

Official data are skewed in states like Wisconsin, where deadly encounters involving Tasers, restraints and other so-called non-deadly means are often not tallied as related to use of force.

For decades, forensic experts say, police and paramedics have cited “excited delirium” — a widely discredited diagnosis blamed for justifying excessive force in cases across the nation.

But even some de-escalation advocates continue to defend the concept behind it: that a subject’s death is inevitable without rapid intervention. It remains a key component in crisis training in Wisconsin.

“The dominoes are already falling, but we can’t see it,” said Wallschlaeger, the retired Appleton officer and crisis intervention team trainer. He described “medically significant situations” in which an agitated subject is fighting with police. “And so we have to err on the side of caution and activate EMS.”

That line of thinking can lead to responses including sedation and restraints, which if not applied properly can prove deadly.

The conflation of force with emergency medical care frustrates other crisis intervention experts who see mixed messages in the training to respond to agitated and mentally ill subjects. 

“On the one hand, you’re training officers to slow things down, use time, use distance,” said Watson, the Wayne State mental health researcher. “But then if someone’s really, really agitated, ‘Oh, you need to tackle them and have EMS sedate them.’ Folks with serious mental illness tend to be at higher risk of having bad responses to that type of sedation.”

That was likely a factor when officers responded to a welfare check for a missing woman and found a combative and delusional VanSyoc in his Kaukauna home in October 2023. The medical examiner found an acute mix of drug toxicity coupled with the restraints and use of the Taser contributed to his death.

Tempelis, the district attorney, cleared the police in his death, stating “it is clear VanSyoc was experiencing a state of excited delirium which in and of itself can cause acute distress and sudden death due to the methamphetamine and designer drugs he consumed prior to officers’ arrival.”

EMS trainer Jaeger reviewed the reports and was critical of the DA’s reasoning and conclusions.

“‘Excited delirium’ is very clearly a flawed concept that should be removed both the name and substance anywhere it appears,” he said.

Major medical organizations in the United States have now rejected it as a scientific concept.

State officials say they are working to remove the term “excited delirium” from law enforcement manuals. Yet even recently updated materials refer to a “freight train to death,” a similar concept that DOJ’s head of police training and standards said conveys the urgent need to attend medically to an agitated person.

Kaukauna Police Chief Jamie Graff defended his officers’ assessment and response in the VanSyoc incident.

“Our department training is consistent with the standards set forth by the Wisconsin Training and Standards Board,” he told Wisconsin Watch.

Jaeger, who helped update New Hampshire protocols that now prohibit sedating subjects lying on their stomachs, and another independent expert said a factor not mentioned in official documents may have contributed to the death: forcing VanSyoc to lie prone with an officer’s weight on his back even after he stopped struggling. 

“It’s been well known for many decades that you’re not supposed to keep people lying on their stomach,” said Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at Harvard University and researcher with the Center for Policing Equity. “You’re supposed to, at minimum, put them on their side.”

The Wisconsin Department of Justice categorizes deaths as arrest-related — rather than from use of force — if suspects are restrained, shocked with Tasers or even sedated in ways medical experts consider potentially dangerous. 

DOJ doesn’t publish stats on when mental illness was evident in an encounter, but Mapping Police Violence found that the deceased person exhibited signs of a crisis in at least 14 of Wisconsin’s at least 43 fatal police encounters since the beginning of 2023.

State public health officials referred questions to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which trains law enforcement in crisis intervention to improve public safety.

Emilie Smiley, program director of NAMI Wisconsin, said she couldn’t comment on specific incidents. 

But she said broadly: “There are situations where law enforcement are not necessarily the best fit for responding to a mental health crisis,” but sometimes law enforcement is necessary. 

DOJ oversight lacking

State law has since 2021 required the Department of Justice to publicly report in-custody, arrest-related and use-of-force deaths. But the department’s dataset — which relies on law enforcement agencies to report incidents — remains incomplete and often misleading, obscuring precise trends. 

The online database tabulates reports by agency, meaning multiple entries could describe the same incident, depending on how many agencies responded.

The Fond du Lac Sheriff’s Office logged one fatal incident in which a suspect shot himself during a shootout with police as a use-of-force injury. But Fond du Lac city police reported it as an arrest-related death. Both appear separately in DOJ’s database.

Some fatal police shootings weren’t counted at all. On Sept. 13, 2022, Milwaukee police shot and killed 40-year-old Sherman D. Solomon after responding to a call of shots fired in a neighborhood.

The Milwaukee Police Department summarized the incident in a six-minute video, but it does not appear in the state’s tracker.

DOJ spokesperson Gillian Drummond would not comment on the omission, nor would she say how the agency evaluates its use-of-force data or views the increasing trends.

“We’re following state statutes,” she said. “The data is online for the public to review.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which lobbied for the state use-of-force reporting law, said DOJ is falling short of its duty to accurately track police violence and publish accurate results.

“It’s really concerning when there are clearly incidents that would fall under the requirements of statutory reporting, and they don’t show up,” said Amanda Merkwae, advocacy director for ACLU Wisconsin.

“It just seems like part of the pattern of individual law enforcement agencies fighting efforts at transparency, as much as they can.”

Calls for more oversight

Advocates for more police oversight argue that today’s officers are too quick to fire a Taser or service weapon when feeling threatened.

Beckman, the retired Kenosha detective, said he faced many scenarios over 30 years that required using physical force to bring combative suspects under control.

“I think about all the times where I could have legally shot somebody — but I didn’t,” he told Wisconsin Watch. “Because I waited until the last possible instance. So I could try to resolve the situation and de-escalate it. And that’s the attitude of most cops.”

He worries that’s starting to change.

Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, faced heavy criticism after suggesting that some politicians shield officers who are “quick to pull the trigger and quick to take a life” by supporting a Republican bill that would have limited avenues to prosecute police officers.

“Everyone makes their own political decisions, but man, it seems like a rough one to defend,” Larson said on the Senate floor.

Republicans publicly rebuked Larson the next day.

“His comments show that he has no understanding about what it is like to be in a position where you might have to take a life in self-defense,” Sen. Jesse James, R-Altoona, a former police officer, said in a press release.

A larger role for state attorneys?

A 2014 state law requires an outside agency to investigate fatal encounters with police. The district attorney of that county must review the findings and decide whether police acted lawfully.

The 2016 shooting of Sylville Smith sparked violent unrest across Milwaukee and resulted in the past decade’s only prosecution of a Wisconsin police officer due to on-duty use of deadly force, according to Mapping Police Violence data. A jury later acquitted ex-officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown of reckless homicide.

La Crosse County District Attorney Tim Gruenke, a veteran prosecutor, said he supports DOJ attorneys reviewing deadly force incidents rather than local prosecutors.

“It can put the DAs in a position where they’re having to make judgments on people that they know that they’ve worked with, they might have opinions about,” Gruenke told Wisconsin Watch.

Gruenke said he has investigated about five police shootings in his multi-decade career that he considered clear-cut with no charges warranted. He said he intends to send the next one he sees to a special prosecutor outside La Crosse.

“I have the option of asking DOJ — there’s no requirement that they take it,” Gruenke said. “Going forward I’ll probably have another DA’s office just look at the ones in my county.” 

DOJ’s Drummond wouldn’t say whether her agency would accept responsibility for investigating and legally reviewing such incidents but noted that it would struggle to do so at current staffing levels.

“There would need to be resources in the form of additional assistant attorneys general to ensure that we were able to meet the demand,” she said.

Legislation sought panel to review police incidents

AB 112 — introduced by Wisconsin Republicans and Sen. Lena Taylor, D-Milwaukee, in 2021 — would have created a statewide panel to review deaths and serious injuries at the hands of police.

Gruenke likens it to the National Transportation Safety Board, which does not rule on culpability of serious crashes but dissects what happened and lessons learned.

“Even if the shooting was legally permissible, even if an officer does something exactly the way they were trained,” Gruenke said, “it’s still something that we should look at to say, ‘Well, are there ways that could have been avoided?’”

Some critics worried the committee’s findings could be used in federal civil or criminal proceedings in ways state lawmakers didn’t intend, said Scott Kelly, an aide to Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, who pushed the bill.

“It is not on our immediate agenda to introduce next session,” Kelly said.

Wisconsin Watch data reporter Khushboo Rathore contributed reporting.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

‘A shoot can be legal. That doesn’t mean it was necessary.’ Fatal police encounters rise in Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

In two police shootings in the past year reviewed by Wisconsin Watch, state and local agencies used potential threats to involved officers as justification to indefinitely withhold the names of officers involved.

The identities of officers who shoot suspects are routinely released elsewhere, though they are not tracked by the state Department of Justice, which collects use-of-force reports.

Last year Wisconsin Watch reported on a troubling exception to default transparency when Oshkosh police invoked Marsy’s Law to shield officer identities in a pair of non-fatal shootings. The constitutional amendment is supposed to protect crime victims, yet a police department claimed an officer had a right to privacy because he was a victim of the suspect he shot. 

In Rice Lake last year, police shot and killed 50-year-old Zachary Veitch in a public housing complex shortly after he was alleged to have stabbed a neighbor. Officers entered the man’s apartment and forced open his bedroom door, then shot him when he emerged with a knife.

A retired police officer who trains departments in crisis intervention reviewed the incident and noted responding officers failed to use de-escalation techniques that could have prevented the death.

But authorities have withheld the names of the police officer and sheriff’s deputy who fired their weapons. Investigators cited threats made by the dead man’s son against officers recorded in jailhouse phone calls following news of the fatal shooting.

Prosecutors declined to file charges against the dead man’s son. But they have agreed to indefinitely withhold the names of the law enforcement officials who killed Veitch, citing the threats.

In another deadly case in Neenah, rifle-wielding police and sheriff’s deputies stormed a gas station’s convenience store and shot a man dead after he allegedly sold drugs to a police informant. 

Officers assigned to the Lake Winnebago Area Metropolitan Enforcement Group killed 37-year-old Nathan Briese in the presence of a store clerk after Briese reached for his pistol, video of the incident shows. 

Knowing Briese was likely armed, officers — whose names were redacted in reports — disregarded their initial plan to carry out an open air arrest to minimize danger to passersby.

Investigators called in from the nearby Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Office withheld the name of the arrest team officer — identified only as “Officer 3,” who ordered the apprehension of Briese despite the presence of bystanders at the convenience store.

Using open source methods, Wisconsin Watch determined the identity of both law enforcement officers who shot Briese. 

The Outagamie County Sheriff’s Department then confirmed that Deputy Justin Ross shot Briese.

“While we stand behind the decision to withhold his name after this incident due to previously cited reasons, we no longer feel it necessary to withhold this,” Outagamie Sheriff’s Lt. Nathan Borman told Wisconsin Watch.

But the Appleton police department more than a year later refuses to confirm the name of its officer who shot Briese, citing unspecified threats to the officer’s safety.

Wisconsin Watch requested the officer’s personnel file, which included a Police Star Medal for participation in the task force’s attempt to arrest Briese.

But the department said it had no use-of-force report on file for the Aug. 2, 2023, shooting, which occurred outside its jurisdiction. Wisconsin Watch is not naming the officer.

Neither agency released details on the nature of threats it used to justify withholding names.

“To my knowledge there was not a formal investigation into the potential threats against officers in this case,” Borman said. “It is not uncommon for officers to receive information about threats which are deemed credible.”

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Details of some fatal Wisconsin police shootings remain secret is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.