Why is crime in Wausau decreasing?

Or is that even true? We dove into the data for Wausau and Marathon County. Here is what we found.

Earlier in the fall of 2025, the Wausau Police Department released its 2024 annual report.

While most media reports focused on the surface-level details, I noticed a couple of trends highlighted in the report.

They all seemed to show decreasing numbers.

What about the crime numbers overall? I decided to take some time to dig through all the reports going back as far as I could, to see if those couple of trending items were indicative of the bigger trend in Wausau crime stats.

Going all the way back to 2019 — the year the police switched how they report their data, making apples-to-apples comparisons difficult — it turns out, I was right.

Crime has been dropping. By a lot.

At least that’s what the data showed. In 2019, there were 2,417 total offenses. By 2024? 1,852.

That matched something I’d seen earlier. Total filed criminal cases, including felony and misdemeanor cases, had been dropping, the last time I looked.

So I logged that data on a spreadsheet as well.

The same trend emerged. In 2019, there were 1,428 felony cases filed in Marathon County Court. By the end of 2025, there were 1,165. Same with misdemeanor cases, except there was an even sharper drop. In 2019, there were 2,232 misdemeanor cases filed.

In 2025? 1,021.

That’s a more than 50% drop in total cases. And that’s not all.

The number of arrests made by the Marathon County Sheriff’s Office isn’t quite as stark, but there is still a decrease: 1,127 to 1,018. (The previous two years were less than 1,000.)

But is that the full story?