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- Wisconsin collects statewide data on serious police uses of force, but inconsistent reporting standards make it difficult to reliably compare departments.
- Police departments differ in what they define use of force, with some tracking actions — such as dog bites, pointing firearms or vehicle maneuvers — that others do not.
- One expert says inconsistent statewide standards can make agencies that report more comprehensively appear more force-prone, potentially discouraging transparency.
A Madison police officer’s fatal shooting of 38-year-old Corey Ruiz last month was the department’s first in more than five years. The last fatal officer-involved shooting in Milwaukee occurred in March, when a police officer shot and killed a man while clinging to the side of a tow truck he was fleeing in.
Madison police officers are less likely to open fire during an arrest than officers in most similarly sized departments nationwide. But police shootings account for only a tiny fraction of all uses of force in Madison and elsewhere.
How does Madison’s broader use-of-force record compare with other departments? Inconsistent state-level data makes that question difficult to answer.
State lawmakers laid the groundwork for such comparisons in 2021 — one of many police oversight reforms enacted nationwide after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd a year earlier. Wisconsin lawmakers voted to require the state Department of Justice to catalog serious uses of force by police departments and sheriffs’ offices. The DOJ now maintains a public Use-of-Force and Arrest-Related Death database, but the underlying law leaves room for law enforcement agencies to differ in the types of force they report to the state.
The result: The data offers apples-to-oranges comparisons that make it difficult to meaningfully weigh one agency’s record against another’s.
Departments vary in rules for use-of-force tracking
Law enforcement agencies generally require officers to report uses of force to their chain of command.
Most agencies compile those records into internal datasets or annual reports, but they vary widely in the types of incidents they track.
The Green Bay Police Department, for instance, requires officers to file an after-action report if they use their police car to block, pin or strike another moving vehicle. The Milwaukee Police Department requires officers to file a similar report after conducting a “forcible blood draw.” Madison Police Department guidelines mention neither type of incident.
Both the Madison and Milwaukee police departments, however, require officers to file after-action reports if they point their firearms at a person, regardless of whether they fire a shot. Green Bay’s department does not.
“There’s really no uniformity,” said Matt Graham, a senior data analyst with the nonprofit Center for Policing Equity.
While some states — New Jersey, for instance — have standardized use-of-force reporting rules for law enforcement, Graham said, Wisconsin’s patchwork of policies more closely resembles the national norm.
Though internal use-of-force data can’t be used to compare agencies, a single police department can still use its own data to “analyze whether any racial or other demographic disparities exist in their use of force patterns” and evaluate whether policies and training effectively limit unnecessary use of force, said Meghan Stroshine, associate director of Marquette University’s Criminal Justice Data Analytics program.
Internal Madison Police Department records show more than 2,300 uses of force between 2020 and the first quarter of 2026, sometimes listing more than one use of force for a single police encounter. Most incidents involved bodily force alone, though officers reported using Tasers 197 times and pepper spray 127 times. The department averaged roughly 185,000 annual calls per service in recent years.
Officer Kiel Baitinger-Peterson’s fatal shooting of Ruiz in late July was the department’s seventh since 2020 and its first fatal case since October 2019, when officers killed 63-year-old Dean Thomas in a shootout on Madison’s southwest side.
Limited state-level data
The Department of Justice database is more complete than Madison’s internal records in at least one instance.
Madison use-of-force records include an entry matching the December 2024 arrest of 32-year-old Richard Johnson in a hotel parking lot. Officers tackled Johnson while investigating a reported car theft; the department’s entry describes his resulting injury as an “abrasion.” It does not note that Johnson went into cardiac arrest and died at a hospital the following day.
The Dane County medical examiner ruled the death an accident, citing Johnson’s cocaine use as the primary cause of his heart attack. Madison’s Office of the Independent Police Monitor disputed that finding in June, arguing that Johnson’s death should be treated as a homicide.
Unlike the internal Madison records, the DOJ’s database includes Johnson’s “arrest related death.”
The 2021 state law behind the DOJ’s use-of-force tracking efforts requires the agency to collect records only on incidents resulting in “great bodily harm or death” and those involving gunfire — either an officer shooting at a civilian or vice versa. A separate law requires the agency to log any cases in which a person “dies while detained, arrested, or in the course of being arrested,” even if the death isn’t a direct result of a use of force. The DOJ combines both sets of records in its database.
That dataset lists 70 arrest-related deaths between 2022 and 2025. The Rock County Sheriff’s Office reported five of those deaths, all but one of which took place in the county’s jail. Though the database doesn’t specify causes of arrest-related deaths, the sheriff’s office characterized one death as a suicide and another as an accidental drug overdose.
The DOJ’s records are far from a perfect measuring stick. The DOJ relies on law enforcement agencies to provide up-to-date reports of serious uses of force, but agencies differ in the types of force they consider serious enough to report to the state.
While the agency “works continuously with agencies to train on proper data entry and usage of the form, as well as performs incident audits,” DOJ spokesperson Riley Vetterkind wrote, “the responsibility to report accurate, up-to-date data falls on each law enforcement agency.”
“Ultimately, even when relying upon a rigid definition, human judgement is still a factor,” he added.
What is ‘great bodily harm’?
Wisconsin Statutes define “great bodily harm” as “bodily injury which creates a substantial risk of death, or which causes serious permanent disfigurement, or which causes a permanent or protracted loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ or other serious bodily injury.”
Those variations can skew the number of incidents a given department reports to the state.
Green Bay police, for instance, reported 31 serious use-of-force incidents to the DOJ between 2022 and 2025 — second only to Milwaukee’s police department, which reported 35 incidents in the same period.
Milwaukee employs roughly 1,500 sworn police officers and received over 1 million calls for service over that four-year span, compared to Green Bay’s 176 sworn officers and roughly 270,000 calls for service.
The Kenosha Police Department, with more sworn officers serving a city only slightly less populous than Green Bay, reported only five incidents.
Those figures do not include arrest-related deaths, including the February 2024 suicide of 40-year-old Steve Evaristo Ventura after a shootout with Green Bay police officers.
But Green Bay may not be as much of an outlier as it appears. All but three of the department’s use-of-force incidents in the state database involve police dog bites.
Madison’s police department has not reported any dog bites to the DOJ since 2022, though its internal records list 27 incidents involving dog bites in the past four years — most of which sent the bitten person to the emergency room. A Madison Police Department spokesperson did not respond to questions about the department’s threshold for reporting uses of force to the state.
The Milwaukee Police Department likewise reported no dog bites to the DOJ between 2022 and 2025, though the department’s own use-of-force records list nearly a dozen dog bite incidents — many of them accidental.
Green Bay Police Chief Chris Davis told Wisconsin Watch he can’t neatly explain his department’s relatively high use-of-force tally without first reviewing peer agencies’ standards for reporting to the DOJ.
“Our intention is to report everything to the state that we’re required to under the law,” he said, “because I think it’s good for the public to know.”
Most Wisconsin law enforcement agencies reported no uses of force to the DOJ. Among those that reported at least one incident, a third exclusively reported incidents in which a police officer discharged a firearm.
The mismatch in use-of-force reporting standards across departments limits the usefulness of the DOJ’s data.
“If you’re able to actually compare across departments, you could have a good idea of what reforms (or) what interventions are actually reducing use of force,” Graham said. “So far, that’s generally not possible in most places in the U.S.”
In the meantime, agencies that report a broader range of use-of-force incidents to the DOJ risk appearing more force-prone than agencies with narrower reporting standards, Stroshine said.
“Without an insider’s understanding of the data and what it represents, one could make any number of erroneous conclusions about a department, its culture, or the nature and frequency of its officers’ use of force,” Stroshine said. “As a consequence, one could argue that nonstandardization creates a disincentive for data transparency.”
The 2021 state law left some discretion for law enforcement agencies to decide which incidents to report to the state.
Some of that flexibility was intentional, said Scott Kelly, chief of staff for state Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, the bill’s prime sponsor.
“One of the things that was discussed was that different departments do record uses of force differently,” he said, “and we didn’t want to change how they dealt with it themselves.”
With law enforcement agencies already under heightened scrutiny at the time, pushing departments to standardize their use-of-force reporting could have been too much to ask, he said. “That’s for a future legislature to decide.”
Davis, the Green Bay chief, says consistent statewide reporting is an achievable goal.
“We already use the same standards for use-of-force training and policy throughout the state,” he said, “so I think it’s not too far to jump to get to the same standards for use-of-force reporting.”
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