Two groups of investigative journalists who track police misconduct have filed a lawsuit hoping to force the Wisconsin Department of Justice to release the names, dates of birth and disciplinary records of every officer in the state.
The Madison-based Badger Project and the Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit journalism production company, filed the lawsuit last Thursday in Dane County Circuit Court after the Justice Department declined to release most of the data, citing the officer safety and called the request excessive. .
“The DOJ’s denial is not legally sufficient to outweigh the strong public policy that promotes disclosure,” the journalism groups argue in the lawsuit. “The public has a greater interest in knowing the identities of government employees authorized to use force – including deadly force – against the public.”
Justice Department spokesperson Gillian Drummond declined to comment Wednesday. James Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, the state’s largest police union, did not return an email seeking comment.
According to the lawsuit, the groups filed an open records request with the Justice Department in November, requesting the full name of each officer and extensive information about each, including date of birth, position and rank, the name of their current agency , start date, previous employment history, and law enforcement disciplinary record.
Paul Ferguson, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Open Government, responded in April with a list of officers who have been demoted or fired, or who resigned in lieu of resignation or resigned before an internal investigation had been completed. He also provided the journalism groups with a list of Justice Department special agents. However, Ferguson redacted all dates of birth and positions in the interest of preventing identity theft and protecting undercover officers.
Ferguson also wrote in a letter to the groups that their request was excessively burdensome, noting that there are approximately 16,000 law enforcement officers working in Wisconsin. He wrote that the Justice Department should contact each of the approximately 571 law enforcement agencies in the state and ask them to determine what information about their officers should be redacted. He added that the Justice Department does not maintain disciplinary records for officers.
The groups argue that Wisconsin’s open records law assumes the public has full access to government documents. Police officers waive certain privacy rights and can expect public scrutiny, they argue.
Journalists across the country have used similar data to expose officers with criminal convictions who have gotten jobs at other law enforcement agencies, and the information released by the Wisconsin Department of Justice is insufficient to meet the needs of the groups and the public to comply, prosecutors allege.
The groups say the agency has not explained how releasing the requested information would put officers at risk, noting that they are not seeking officers’ home addresses.
Reviewing the data for potential redactions can be “labor intensive,” but the Justice Department is a huge agency with hundreds of employees, the groups argue. The agency can be expected to handle large file requests because police oversight is so important, they say. As for reviewing redactions at individual departments, the agency “cannot outsource the determinations for its own administration.”
Bill Lueders, chairman of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, said the group supports the lawsuit.
“We believe Wisconsin should not have a secret police,” Lueders said. “There is no good reason to withhold requested police certification and employment records, which are highly relevant to identifying cases where officers fired in one jurisdiction have been hired in another.”
The Invisible Institute strives to hold public institutions accountable. The organization won two Pulitzer Prizes earlier this month. One of the awards was for a series about missing black girls and women in Chicago and how racism and police response contributed to the problem. The other award was for “You Didn’t See Nothin,” a podcast about the ripple effects of a 1997 hate crime on the city’s South Side.
The Badger Project describes itself on its website as a nonpartisan, nonprofit journalism organization. It won third place in the Milwaukee Press Club’s online division for best investigative story or series for a series about active Wisconsin police officers who joined the far-right Oath Keepers group.
The Invisible Institute has filed a similar lawsuit seeking to discover the names, birth years, ranks and divorce history of all police officers working in Colorado. Other news organizations have filed lawsuits seeking the same information in New York and Delaware.
