‘A shoot can be legal. That doesn’t mean it was necessary.’ Fatal police encounters rise in Wisconsin

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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.

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.

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.

Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul told reporters earlier this summer the increase is “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.

De-escalation protocols unheeded in Rice Lake

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 he allegedly attacked a neighbor with a knife and then fled.

Medics had already treated the stabbing victim for injuries when police entered Veitch’s apartment and threatened to use a barking police dog if Veitch didn’t come out of his bedroom.

Thirty seconds later they forced Veitch’s bedroom door open. He lunged with a knife, and officers shot him dead in his kitchen.

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.

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

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.

Wisconsin a regional leader in fatal encounters

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 Craig Futterman, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago and founder of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Clinic.

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

‘Excited delirium’ remains on the books

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.

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,” said Amy Watson, a mental health researcher at Wayne State University who has studied fatal police encounters. “But then if someone's really, really agitated,” she said, officers are instructed to use overwhelming force and have medics use sedatives.

That was likely a factor when officers responded to Eric VanSyoc’s Kaukauna home in October 2023 and found his wife dead. Officers fired a Taser, sat on his back for six minutes and injected him with ketamine. His breathing became labored, and he died at the hospital.

“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.

Outagamie County District Attorney Melinda Tempelis 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.”

Major medical organizations in the United States have now rejected “excited delirium” 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, noting that their training is “consistent with the standards set forth by the Wisconsin Training and Standards Board.”

Independent experts 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.”

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. At least one fatal shooting that led to the death of 40-year-old Sherman D. Solomon on Sept. 13, 2022, by Milwaukee police was not listed despite the department publicizing the incident.

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

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.

La Crosse County District Attorney Tim Gruenke 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.

He said he intends to send the next fatal encounter review 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.”

Drummond wouldn’t say whether her agency would accept added responsibilities.

“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.

Wisconsin Watch data reporter Khushboo Rathore contributed reporting.

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Fatal police encounters rise in Wisconsin