Ryan Thornton, 37, of Racine reached a plea deal after being charged with threatening Wisconsin Chief Justice Jill Karofsky.
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The bill would require any registered sex offender in Wisconsin to wear a GPS ankle monitor unless they can provide a permanent address.
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Last month, the Verona Common Council voted not to renew their contract with Flock after receiving a flood of public comments opposing them.
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Federal and local law enforcement officers arrest a man in Washington, D.C., in August. The number of arrests nationwide fell sharply in 2020 and have stayed down since then, according to a new report from the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice. (Photo by Andrew Leyden/Getty Images)
Arrests in the United States have fallen to levels not seen in decades, according to a new report that reconstructs national arrest trends in the absence of federal data.
The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, on Thursday released the first comprehensive national analysis of arrests since federal authorities stopped publishing detailed arrest statistics in 2020.
Arrests plunged during the first year of the pandemic and have remained low, according to the analysis. The national arrest rate in 2024 was 30% below the 2019 level and 71% lower than the peak in 1994.
Drug arrests have fallen even faster, with adult and juvenile drug-offense arrest rates dropping to about half of what they were in 2019.
In 1980, juveniles made up nearly a fifth of arrests nationwide, but by 2018, their share had fallen to 7%. While adult arrest rates declined 7% between 2020 and 2024, juvenile rates rose 14% over the same period.
Gender patterns have shifted as well. With arrests of men falling more steeply over time, women now account for a larger portion of arrests. Adult women’s share nearly doubled between 1980 and 2020, rising from 14% to about 27%. Girls’ share of juvenile arrests grew from 18% to roughly 31%.
Between 2020 and 2024, arrest rates for Black and Asian juveniles surged 48% and 45%, respectively, compared with an 11% increase among white youth. Rates for American Indian and Alaska Native juveniles fell 4%.
Among adults, arrest rates increased by 12% for Black people and 18% for Asian people, but declined by 10% for white adults and 17% for American Indian and Alaska Native adults.
Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at ahernandez@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Community leaders in Milwaukee are raising concerns about the proposed use of facial recognition technology by the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office.
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A Biden-era protection for reproductive and gender affirming health care information was upended by a federal judge in Texas in June. Despite several lawsuits, key privacy rules for medical records remain, but some experts say they aren’t sufficient. (Photo by Dave Whitney / Getty Images)
The four lawsuits at the center of a Republican-led effort to ensure law enforcement can access reproductive health records are now mostly resolved, after attorneys for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton agreed last week to dismiss the last remaining suit challenging the legality of a foundational health privacy rule.
Paxton filed the lawsuit in September 2024 arguing that Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration illegally created a rule under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act barring certain reproductive health care information from being disclosed if a procedure such as abortion was obtained in a state where it is legal.
The federal HIPAA law is meant to protect patient information generally, especially when that information travels between providers. It contains exceptions for information that can be disclosed to investigators, who can subpoena records from other states.
Ashley Kurzweil, senior policy analyst for reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women & Families, said the dual threat that Paxton’s lawsuit presented was alarming on a much wider scale than just reproductive health care, so it is a relief that the case is dismissed. Overturning key privacy protections from 2000 that formed the basis of the Biden-era rule could have thrown the entire health care system into chaos, she said.
“We are thrilled that the 2000 privacy rule is still in effect. It is hugely important that it is still in place,” Kurzweil said. “However, (it) provides insufficient safeguards for reproductive health care information when it comes to the broader landscape of increased criminalization risk that people are facing.”
The 2024 rule specifically relating to reproductive and gender-affirming health care information was nullified in June by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. His ruling came in a Texas-based case filed by a clinician in a small town who said the rule created a conflict with her responsibility to report child abuse, because she considers abortion and gender-affirming health care to be child abuse.
Without those 2024 protections, doctors can choose whether to report patients to law enforcement, Kurzeil said, and some might also be discouraged from offering reproductive health care altogether to minimize legal risks.
States Newsroom reported more than 400 people were charged with pregnancy-related crimes in the two years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, according to data from the nonprofit Pregnancy Justice.
One of those people was Brittany Watts, an Ohio woman who went to the hospital with miscarriage complications and waited for hours without receiving help. After miscarrying at home and returning to the hospital, staff called the police, accusing her of abuse of a corpse. A grand jury declined to indict her, and Watts is now suing the hospital.
In nine of the 400 cases, pregnant people were accused of researching or attempting to obtain an abortion.
The case before Kacsmaryk is the only one of the four that resulted in a ruling. Although it was filed in the last few months of the Biden administration, the bulk of the case was litigated under Republican President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice.
Repealing the rule was a directive in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation. Several prominent anti-abortion organizations were part of the panel that drafted Project 2025, and many of the people involved in writing the 900-page document now work for the Trump administration.
Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization, represented Doctors for America and the cities of Columbus, Ohio, and Madison, Wisconsin, in an attempt to intervene in the case because they did not expect the government to defend the rule. If they were allowed to intervene, they could appeal Kacsmaryk’s opinion striking down the rule regardless of the Trump administration’s decision.
Their attempts were denied by Kacsmaryk, and while the organization did initially appeal that decision, the attorneys dropped the effort in September, saying in a court filing that “the resources of the parties and the courts would be best conserved by dismissing this appeal.”
In a statement to States Newsroom, a spokesperson for Democracy Forward said they will continue to pursue every tool available to defend reproductive rights from political interference and anti-abortion extremists.
The other two cases are in Missouri and Tennessee, where Republican attorneys general also challenged the 2024 reproductive health care-specific rule. The Missouri case was dismissed in September, because Kacsmaryk’s decision had a nationwide effect, and the Tennessee attorney general asked the court to dismiss their case for the same reason. The judge in that case has not yet granted the motion.
Texas and Louisiana have recently launched investigations into out-of-state doctors who, through telehealth, prescribed and mailed abortion medication to patients in their states where abortion is outlawed.
Texas officials have repeatedly investigated and attempted to prosecute people for either leaving the state to seek abortion care or for prescribing abortion medication from a different state. At the end of October, a New York judge dismissed a civil case brought by Paxton seeking $100,000 in damages from a provider the AG said prescribed abortion pills to a woman in the Dallas area, according to The Texas Tribune. Officials in Louisiana attempted to extradite the same New York doctor on criminal charges related to an abortion medication prescription for a pregnant minor. That case was also rejected.
Those attempts were some of the first that tested shield laws implemented by 18 states, including New York. Four others have executive orders from Democratic governors saying they won’t comply with extradition requests for investigations into reproductive health care.
Texas has also passed a law allowing people to seek at least $100,000 in damages if someone they impregnated or someone they’re related to received abortion pills by mail from another state. That law took effect Thursday, Dec. 4.
Kurzweil said those shield laws are a vital help to patients seeking care, but the addition of a federal protective rule would be ideal.
“The two in tandem would be much more fulsome and would address gaps that come up,” she said.
This story was originally produced by News From The States, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Federal agents, including members of the Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol, and police, attempt to keep protesters back outside a downtown U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility on Oct. 4, 2025 in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Members of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee decried violence against law enforcement, but seemed to make little headway in identifying how to address the issue during a Wednesday hearing that often saw each party harshly blame the other.
Chairman Andrew Garbarino of New York, at his first hearing since taking over as for the retired Mark Green of Tennessee, sought to strike an even tone in an opening statement, condemning violence against police while noting that officers have a responsibility to maintain the public’s trust.
“Law enforcement personnel are public servants, not public figures. They stepped forward to safeguard our nation and uphold the laws enacted by this body,” Garbarino said. “But that alone does not absolve them from facing any form of accountability. Public trust and public safety go hand in hand.”
Other members of the panel, though, were less even-handed, with Democrats strongly criticizing some tactics used by federal law enforcement officers under President Donald Trump and Republicans denouncing such criticism as fueling violence against police.
Several members of the panel, of both parties, acknowledged the two West Virginia National Guard members shot in a Nov. 26 alleged ambush in Washington, D.C.
Witnesses from three police organizations, the Fraternal Order of Police, the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, largely agreed that heightened rhetoric about law enforcement activity was a danger to their members.
“The rhetoric coming from the top, calling officers Nazis and Gestapo, it better stop right now,” Jonathan Thompson, the executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association, said.
“You are inflaming dangerous circumstances. You’re attacking people that wake up every single day and do one thing: they put on their uniforms, they put on their star and… enforce the laws of this country.”
Daniel Hodges, a D.C. Metropolitan Police officer who responded to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and who Democrats invited to testify to the panel as a private citizen Wednesday, said protocol of federal officers under Trump invited the comparison.
“There is a semi-secret police force abducting people based on the color of their skin and sending many of them via state-sponsored human trafficking to extraterritorial concentration camps,” he said.
“Before we go around the room clutching our pearls, wondering how people could possibly compare law enforcement in this country to the Gestapo, maybe we should take a moment and ask ourselves if there isn’t some recent behavior on the government’s part that could encourage such juxtaposition,” Hodges said.
Patrick Yoes, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said violence against officers was a nonpartisan issue.
“My members are both Democrat and Republican,” he said. “And we’re all having the same problem.”
Several Democrats said the tactics used by officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, undermined their law enforcement mission and endangered them, while Republicans blamed that rhetoric for making police targets.
New York Democrat Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor, objected to Thompson’s testimony that police officers “put on their uniforms.”
“The problem is that’s not the case,” Goldman said. “They don’t put on a uniform, they don’t wear identification, and they go out with masks on to — violently in many cases — arrest unsuspecting immigrants, non-violent, many of whom are actually here legally.”
Goldman said as a federal prosecutor he worked with DHS officers “who represented the very, very best of our country.” But under Trump, the department’s behavior had grown irresponsible, he said.
Illinois Democrat Delia Ramirez went further, calling DHS “the single biggest threat to public safety right now.”
“They use anonymity to terrorize our communities and to violate our rights,” she said. “They reject accountability. They disregard court orders and they violate consent decrees. Bottom line: DHS agents lie. They act with impunity. They reject checks and balances, and they ignore Congress and the courts.”
Republicans on the panel deflected blame from DHS and drew a direct line from the rhetoric of some Democrats opposed to ICE’s tactics to physical attacks on law enforcement.
Tennessee Republican Andy Ogles said Ramirez’s comment “pisses me off” and characterized DHS agents as carrying out the rule of law.
“This is about the rhetoric against law enforcement, violence against law enforcement,” Ogles said. “This isn’t about ICE. This isn’t about deportations, or the (Homeland Security) secretary doing her job, securing the border and deporting those who are here illegally.”
Rep. Eli Crane, an Arizona Republican, played a video showing Rep LaMonica McIver, a New Jersey Democrat who also sits on the panel, confronting ICE agents at a detention facility in her district.
“What do you think it means to people that are out there watching and listening, watching social media, watching the news, and they see a member of Congress who sits on this committee go out there and behave like that?” Crane asked the witnesses.
Thompson answered he was “appalled.”
“Quite honestly, I find it reprehensible, and it’s obviously dangerous,” he said.
McIver said she had been doing her job to provide oversight.
Democrats also cited Trump’s pardons of people convicted of crimes as part of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as condoning violence against law enforcement.
McIver suggested committee Republicans were hypocritical in condemning some anti-police rhetoric while staying silent or praising Trump’s decision to pardon Jan.6 rioters.
“It is not Democrats who are praising, let alone pardoning, people who stormed this very Capitol complex to beat police officers and hunt down elected officials,” she said.
A video quickly circulating online showed a father boarding a school bus and telling his daughter to hit another student. The man has now been arrested by local police.
The incident occurred Oct. 9 on a Ferguson-Florissant School District near St. Louis, Missouri. On Tuesday, the Ferguson Police Department identified the father as Maurice Fox, 36, in a statement.
In the video footage released by the department, Fox is seen onboard the bus telling his first-grade daughter to assault another student saying, “This one? Yeah, do what I told you to,” and “Don’t put your hands on my daughter no more because if I find out you’re touching her again, your parents will have to talk to me.” The daughter then begins punching the other student. When she stops, Fox says, “Again, I want her crying.”
Fox later posted on social media that he felt he did what he needed to do to teach his daughter to defend herself from bullies
A news article reported that before Fox was taken into custody, he created an online fundraiser seeking donations for his legal defense. But a spokesperson for GoFundMe said the platform’s terms of service prohibit people charged with violent crimes from raising money for their legal defense. The fundraising page was removed and donations were refunded.
The article also said that according to an affidavit, the school bus driver tried to stop Fox, but “he pushed the driver’s arm out of the way and continued walking.” The video blurs the faces of all others on the school bus, but the school bus driver appears to be seated at the front of the vehicle.
The statement said that Ferguson Police Chief Troy Doyle confirmed that Fox turned himself and is being held at the St. Louis County Justice Center with a $100,000 bond.
Prior to Fox’s arrest on Monday after turning himself in, police said he was being sought on an at-large warrant from the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s office. Fox is now also facing charges of one count of first-degree harassment, two counts of assault in the fourth degree and trespassing on a school bus.
“This incident is extremely troubling on many levels. As adults, we have a responsibility to model appropriate behavior and teach our children how to resolve conflict peacefully. Encouraging violence among children — especially in such a public and frightening way — is unacceptable. We are grateful this individual chose to turn himself in, and we hope this brings some measure of accountability,” said Police Chief Troy Doyle.
He continued, “No child should ever be exposed to that kind of behavior, especially in a setting that should feel safe, like a school bus,” he said. “We encourage parents and guardians to work with school officials, counselors and community resources when facing conflicts involving their children. Collaboration and communication, not confrontation, are how we keep our kids and schools safe.”
In the comments on the police statement, many people commented on the difficult emotions of knowing a child is being bullied, but that there are better ways to handle the situation.
School Transportation News reached out to Ferguson-Florissant School District for comment and received the following statement from their communications department:
“We fully cooperated with law enforcement as they addressed this matter. Student and staff safety is always our top priority, and we will not tolerate anything that compromises their safety. School buses are an extension of the school campus. Trespassing on a school bus and engaging in the behavior described in this incident are completely unacceptable.”
Related: School Violence Grant Provides Opportunity for Threat Assessment Training
Related: Florida District Introduces Innovative Safety Training for School Bus Drivers
Related: 9-Year-Old Arrested for Bringing Loaded Gun onto Florida School Bus
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For National School Bus Safety Week, the West Virginia Department of Education partnered with the state police department to create a video that is a sobering reminder of the dangers of illegal passing. The video shows footage of a student getting off the school bus and nearly being struck by a motorist driving past the stopped bus. Jimmy Lacy, the transportation director for the state’s Department of Education, and Sgt. Travis Bailes of the Charleston Police Department outline the impact on student safety and state regulations regarding illegal passing.
Related: WATCH: Michigan Association Releases Illegal Passing PSA for School Bus Safety Week
Related: Wisconsin State Police, School Bus Association Promote School Bus Safety
Related: Gallery: National School Bus Safety Week 2024
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A jail lieutenant for a northern Wisconsin sheriff’s office resigned in 2022 after an internal investigation found he sent sexually explicit messages and photos to female subordinates. He now works as a police officer in a neighboring county.
Jeffrey Johnson worked at the Sawyer County Sheriff’s Office for 10 years, rising to administrator of the county jail, before he “resigned in lieu of termination,” according to a Wisconsin Department of Justice database that tracks law enforcement officers who leave a position under negative circumstances. Johnson started working for the Minong Police Department in Washburn County a little over a year later, according to the same database.
His resignation came after he admitted to sending “text messages of a sexual nature to a subordinate jail deputy, including pictures of your genitals,” according to a document from the sheriff’s office The Badger Project obtained in a records request. “When confronted about these text messages, you did not deny sending them and noted you could not recall the messages, given you were likely intoxicated when they were sent.”
Sawyer County refused to release the full investigation report to The Badger Project, citing client-attorney privilege, but one of the documents it did release notes that Johnson interacted similarly with “a number of other female deputies.”
Sawyer County Sheriff Doug Mrotek said in an interview that scrutiny on Johnson was greater because he was a leader and oversaw the jail’s staff of about 17 people. But he was not on duty when he sent the messages and the interactions didn’t constitute harassment, Mrotek said.
“We all make mistakes,” Mrotek said. “We all can have a bad day. It’s tough for me not to have a lot of respect for his integrity and character. Now make no mistake, I’m not saying that I condone his wrong action … but he made a mistake. And that mistake cost him his position as a leader.”
Mrotek said if Johnson had been a patrol deputy and not a jail lieutenant at the time, he would probably still be working for the Sawyer County Sheriff’s Office.
“It’s a leader-subordinate issue,” Mrotek said. But “he’s not going to make the same mistake twice.”
Johnson used Mrotek as a reference when he applied to his current job, where he works as a patrol officer and not in a supervisory role.
Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
Minong Police Department Chief Lucas Shepard wrote in an email that Johnson was recommended for the position by the command staff at Sawyer County Sheriff’s Office.
Shepard also said Johnson was unanimously approved for the position at his department by himself and four citizen representatives. The chief and Johnson are Minong’s only full-time police officers.
Shepard said his department’s own background check revealed that the allegations of misconduct against Johnson involved consensual behavior that happened off duty.
“Beyond his resignation from that department, Officer Johnson offered the Minong Police Department years of valuable knowledge, training, and experience in law enforcement,” Shepard wrote. He “exemplifies what community-based policing strives for and if he has one definite characteristic as an officer, it is the care that he has for the people that he is policing.”
The total number of law enforcement officers in Wisconsin has dropped for years and now sits at a near-record low, according to stats from the state DOJ, as chiefs and sheriffs, especially in rural areas, say they struggle to fill positions in an industry less attractive to people than it once was.
This cop crunch has been a problem for years across the country, experts say.
Statewide, the number of wandering officers, those who were fired or forced out from a previous job in law enforcement, continues to rise. Nearly 400 officers in Wisconsin currently employed were fired or forced out of previous jobs in law enforcement in the state, almost double the amount from 2021. And that doesn’t include officers who were pushed out of law enforcement jobs outside of the state and came to Wisconsin to work.
Despite their work histories, wandering officers can be attractive to hire for law enforcement agencies, as they already have their certification, have experience and can start working immediately.
Law enforcement agencies can look up job applicants in the state DOJ’s database to get more insight into officers’ work history. And a law enacted in 2021 in Wisconsin bans law enforcement agencies from sealing the personnel files and work histories of former officers, previously a common tactic for cops with a black mark on their record.
About 13,400 law enforcement officers are currently employed in Wisconsin, excluding those who primarily work in a corrections facility, according to the state DOJ. Wandering officers make up about 2.5% of the total.
At least one major study published in the Yale Law Journal has found that wandering officers are more likely to receive a complaint for a moral character violation, compared to new officers and veterans who haven’t been fired or forced out from a previous position in law enforcement.
This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.
Ex-Sawyer County jail head who sent lewd texts to female employees is now working at nearby police department 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.
Nevada became the 26th state to authorize school districts to install and use school bus stop-arm cameras.
Assembly Bill 527, which passed June 6 and went into effect on July 1, allows school districts to install the cameras and for law enforcement to use evidence of illegal passing to issue citations to the vehicle’s registered owner. Fines collected are used to fund the installation, maintenance and operation of the camera systems as well as pay the vendor to install, operate or maintain the systems.
School districts that choose to vieo cameras must conduct a public awareness campaign regarding the use of cameras and notify the public on when enforcement starts.
While school district leaders applaud the law, local police departments are questioning if they have adequate staffing to handle review video and issue citations, as noted in a local news article.
The law also addresses privacy concerns by requiring school districts and police departments to delete images of vehicles after 90 days.
Related: New York State Amends School Bus Camera Law Following Court Rulings
Related: Update: Nevada School District Raises Pay Amid Bus Driver Shortage
Related: Are Extended Stop Arms Part of Solution to Illegal School Bus Passing?
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Authorities in Alaska found 50 pounds of dynamite on an old school bus Wednesday, reported Fox 19.
According to the news report, Special Agent in Charge Rebecca Day said the property owner, who was not identified at this writing, discovered the dynamite in the school bus located on Richarson Highway. The bus was parked on his property, and he called law enforcement, which in turn contacted the FBI.
State troopers and other agencies shut down the highway for seven hours as they investigated. Agents said the dynamite was at least 20 years old and its location near the highway made it unsafe to attempt a controlled detonation.
Day told local media that authorities worked to remove the dynamite to a more appropriate location to dispose of it safely. The dynamite was doused with chemicals to keep it from exploding while it was burned. The situation was also monitored by a bomb disposal robot.
Authorities reportedly did not provide information on how the explosives got on the school bus or their intended use. Day stated that if anyone finds explosives in or on their property the best thing to do is contact law enforcement, which will assess the situation before making sure the explosives are disposed of safely.
Related: Alaska School Bus Driver Arrested for DUI, Firearm Possession
Related: Alaska School Bus Driver Charged with DUI
Related: Law Enforcement Expert Shares Importance of Identifying Weapons on School Buses
Related: WATCH: Fire Expert to Lead School Bus Evacuation Training at STN EXPO West
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