Why is crime dropping in Wausau... or is it?

We look at the data, and then look behind the data to find out what is going on with Marathon County crime

Marathon County deputies and other officers participated in crisis intervention training, meant to teach officers how to de-escalate. This actor was herself an Appleton police officer.

Something I noticed nationally - after a spike in crime, I’ve noticed the numbers are actually starting to fall, and that crime is decreasing. This is true in most cities except for some outliers such as Chicago and San Francisco. (Even then, it’s complicated — despite what you hear rates mostly just haven’t fallen the same way as in the rest of the country.)

So I naturally wondered: What about Wausau?

I checked two sources of information: One was the FBI crime stats. They’re useful, broken down by policing agency, but also out of date (they’re only updated through 2022).

A check of both Wausau Police and Marathon County Sheriff’s Office shows that violent crime is decreasing. But did that trend continue?

One of my ongoing projects has been to track total number of cases filed in Marathon County court. It’s not a perfect metric for a number of reasons — a file could mean one charge, or it could mean several; and each defendant in one crime could have a separate file. But as a general indicator it’s a pretty good one.

And the indicator here signals a major drop. The year 2023 saw the fewest number of felony cases filed going back to 2016, when I started keeping track. The highest number came in 2021, with 1,650 cases filed. In 2023, only 1,227 cases were filed. (There were 1,500 cases filed in 2022.) The number of cases filed in 2021 was the highest of the 8-year period I’ve covered.

The same goes for misdemeanor cases, which unlike the felony case spike, has been steadily decreasing. In 2018, there were 2,565 cases filed; by 2022, that number reduced to 1,170, far less than half as many.

There are also fewer people in county jail. Daily census counts had started to reach 400, far more than the jail’s capacity. Today, that number is in the high 200s and is manageable (kind of: we’ll explore that more later in the piece).

What the heck is going on? It depends on who you ask. The Wausonian spoke to Wausau Police Chief Matt Barnes, Marathon County Sheriff Chad Billeb and Marathon County District Attorney Theresa Wetzsteon. They all have somewhat different, but somewhat overlapping reasons for why crime/case filings are decreasing.

Crisis intervention

No one talks about it these days, but in the late 2010s, there was a real crisis forming in the Marathon County Jail. The place was overflowing, the county was spending millions on housing inmates in other county jails and all the talk was on when, not if, the county was going to build a new jail.

But that talk disappeared. Why? Because the jail population has dropped dramatically.

Recently the population was around 280, far below the peak of 430 at one point in the worst of the overpopulation crisis. During that time, roughly 100 inmates were housed in other counties, which costs the county time transporting inmates around and money (both for the transport and for housing them.

Today the only reason any inmates are housed out of county is because like many industries, the Marathon County Sheriff’s Office is having trouble hiring corrections officers, says Marathon County Sheriff Chad Billeb. Billeb says with a full staff, there would be no need to house any inmates out of county.

Why? Billeb attributes it to a couple of things. In 2016, all deputies underwent crisis intervention training. Your Wausonian editor attended a couple of sessions. The sessions involved actors playing the part of someone having a mental health crisis, acting out realistic scenarios actual officers face.

The point is that officers learn how to de-escalate situations, causing fewer of those situations to result in someone being taken to jail.

But that’s only one factor. COVID brought another policy that’s been leading to at least fewer jail stays. With the need to keep the jail population to a minimum in the wake of the pandemic, officers started taking a citation-first policy for non-violent crimes. Billeb told The Wausonian that when he was a deputy, the attitude was to always arrest. “I'll tell you that, as a brand new deputy and a brand new officer 30 years ago, it was arrest, arrest, arrest over, that's what we did,” Billeb told The Wausonian. “And now we're asking folks to do things a little bit differently.”

Billeb is quick to point out that what he’s talking about is not what we will call the Larry Krasner approach. For those not familiar, the Philadelphia DA is one of several progressive DAs in major cities who are dedicated to ending the cycle of crime by taking a more lenient approach to prosecuting those who break the law. The approach has led many to question those practices as people who commit violent offenses frequently end up back on the street to commit more offenses.

Billeb says that’s not what is going on here. Those accused of violent crimes are still arrested, and officers are empowered to make those decisions using their own judgment.

But even those two reasons don’t fully explain the drop in numbers. Felonies along with misdemeanors have dropped a lot. What is going on there?

Billeb and Marathon County District Attorney Theresa Wetzsteon both explained to The Wausonian that there are two types of programs that are leading to not necessarily fewer people breaking the law (in the short term, anyway) but fewer people ending up in jail - and in the latter case, even ending up in the court records.

The county for years has had a diversion program, in which some defendants qualify to participate without going through the court system, getting convicted and sentenced, etc. Wetzsteon tells The Wausonian that it’s one of the largest in the state.

But the newest one is called a deflection program, and that intercepts certain defendants before they ever enter the court system to begin with. The DA’s office began to facilitate that program for the Marathon County Sheriff’s Office in October. So far that has received 51 deferrals, Wetzsteon says. “Success of this intervention results in the case not being charged, and a reduction in any future criminal acts and charges by the participant,” Wetzsteon says. “Although this program is new, the results have been positive thus far.”

Does that mean fewer calls for service? Not so fast, says Wausau Police Chief Matt Barnes. The city is in the process of hiring two new officers to deal with trouble downtown largely stemming from some members of Wausau’s homeless population. The team is or will be on the streets soon, providing a downtown foot patrol that many Wausonians have been asking for over the years.

Barnes says he’s supportive of those measures but doesn’t believe they’re responding to fewer calls for service. “We try to be proactive, use good info in where to put our resources,” Barnes says. “If that played a role [in reducing crime numbers], we’re happy about that.”

Wausau PD provides an officer for the Crisis Assessment Response Team, also known as CART, which pairs a police officer and deputy with two crisis workers from North Central Health Care. That team specializes in helping people in crisis and has a higher level of training than ordinary officers.

Barnes says that the team operates on the notion of using the least restrictive method to accomplish what they need to. He says that’s a similar attitude police take toward criminal behavior in general today

“When Chad and I were young officers, if you had marijuana on you, you went to jail,” Barnes says. “Now it’s a citation.” (There is of course a caveat that if you had large quantities on you, that might be a different story.) “The idea is ‘what is best for the community?’”

What the numbers really mean

That makes evaluating the data challenging. Is crime really dropping, or is it being treated differently?

Looking at calls for service would provide some really useful data about what the real numbers are. Barnes says those calls aren’t dropping. They’re just leading to fewer arrests. And diversion and deflection programs are keeping fewer from ending up in the criminal justice system.

But also, the deflection program probably hasn’t had a huge impact on the numbers we’ve presented — at least not yet. Since it only began in October, that’s only two to three months into 2023, the last year we have data for.

There’s a paradox that comes up in government often. It’s the idea that spending money on something early can save money down the road. But how do you ever prove that? The expense down the road not being incurred obviously never happens, so you can’t really know if you prevented it or it just never happened anyway. That gives leeway to people who wonder why that money needs to be spent in the first place. You never know if you’re removing a Chesterton fence until you actually remove it, and the wolves come charging in.

That somewhat applies here. An argument can always be made that maybe crime numbers would have dropped anyway, without all of those interventions. There is some evidence in this direction, after all. Crime numbers nationwide have been dropping following a recent spike around 2020, according to FBI national statistics. Murders and non-negligent manslaughter dropped between 2021 and 2022; so did rape, aggravated assault and robberies.

But Marathon County’s numbers have decreased pretty significantly. The felony case drop is pretty significant, but the drop by more than half of misdemeanor cases between 2017 and 2023 is astounding.

Either way, it’s hard to argue that crime numbers decreasing isn’t a good thing.

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