AG is withholding information about “wandering officers”
The Milwaukee Police Administration Building in downtown Milwaukee. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
Since 2017, Wisconsin policing regulators have tracked what they call “flagged officers”: cops who get fired, resign in lieu of a termination, or resign before an investigation into alleged misconduct can be completed.
The regulators, with the Law Enforcement Standards Board (LESB), were prompted by a series of reports on officers accused of sexual assault and dishonesty who had been able to get rehired — including as a police chief — with little oversight from the state.
“What we’re trying to do is eliminate the opportunity for somebody to slip through the cracks,” the chair of the LESB said at the time, referring to a phenomenon often called “wandering officers.”
Seven years in, it’s difficult to see what has changed: Because flagged officers can still be hired, they often are — and at an increasing rate, according to recent reporting. And because the flagged officers list is limited to only some officers who were disciplined or resigned, there is still potential for additional officers with histories of misconduct to have slipped through the cracks to new agencies undetected.
At the same time, total law enforcement staffing has continued to drop as departments face what they term a hiring “crisis.” This has prompted at least one local expert to raise concern that the hiring shortage could allow for more “wandering officers” to be hired to fill empty positions.
Unfortunately it’s impossible to fully understand the scale of the problem in Wisconsin. That’s because the Wisconsin Department of Justice (DOJ), which houses the LESB, refuses to release the state’s full police certification and employment data. That puts Wisconsin in a small minority of states — just 14 — that have denied access to this information, according to a nationwide reporting project. Over 30 states have released certification data — including Wisconsin’s neighbors Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota.
Now, Invisible Institute, a nonprofit public accountability journalism organization based in Chicago, and our co-plaintiff The Badger Project, have filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the DOJ’s denial of this basic information.