Dozens of Wisconsin's largest police departments arrest black people more than people of other races at rates higher than Ferguson, Missouri, the flashpoint for a national conversation about how police interact with minorities.

Departments from Appleton to Wauwatosa — 48 in all in Wisconsin — exceed Ferguson's controversial 3-to-1 disparity in arrests of blacks, according to a Gannett Wisconsin Media analysis of 61 police and sheriff's departments.

While experts recognize the disparity is problematic, the causes are complex, engrained in the country's culture, they said.

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"Of course it's a serious concern. It manifestly points to a serious problem," said Pamela Oliver, a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociology professor. "The statistical disparities are huge. The bigger question is why they're occurring."

Police are quick to point to socioeconomic factors like unemployment, poverty and education as contributors to the inequality, but Oliver said digging deeper into arrest numbers can reveal potential biases within a police department. Still, Appleton's top cop says law enforcement agencies take special care to avoid bias and weed out officers who could cause problems.

Ferguson — where a grand jury stands on the brink of deciding whether to indict an officer who killed an unarmed black teenager in August — spurred a USA TODAY analysis that found communities across the country have racial disparities even more pronounced than in Ferguson. The review of 3,538 police departments focused on agencies with at least 200 arrests in 2011 and 2012 in a community with a black population of at least 500 and compared the arrest rates among different races, basing rates on 2010 census data.

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In Wisconsin, 61 departments met those guidelines, and of those, all but 13 had greater disparities than Ferguson's. In all but four jurisdictions — the Stanley, Sturtevant and Waupun police departments and the Adams County Sheriff's Departments — black people were more likely to be arrested than non-blacks. On average, Wisconsin police were 6.4 times more likely to arrest a black person over the two years at the largest departments that report data to the FBI.

Topping the list is the Wauwatosa Police Department, which serves a population of 46,396. Of the 4,829 people arrested in 2011 and 2012, almost 60 percent were black, even though only 4 percent of the total population was black. Overall, black people were 30 times more likely to be arrested in 2011 and 2012.

In Appleton, where 2 percent of the 72,623 residents were black, police were 10 times more likely to arrest a black person than their non-black counterparts — the fifth-highest disparity among the 61 Wisconsin agencies. Arrests for drug sale or manufacturing were even more lopsided — blacks were 20 times more likely to be arrested than people of other races.

But the numbers can be "deceiving," said Appleton interim Chief James Lewis.

Census data, for example, doesn't include visitors who commit crimes, like Green Bay's Andre Stackhouse, who was charged with the Antro Nightclub stabbing earlier this month.

"Just like Green Bay is a different town on a Packers weekend, you'd have to get a feel for the ebb and flow of the community," Lewis told Gannett Wisconsin Media. "You can do your own study, spending a Saturday night walking from tavern to tavern on College Avenue. It's not 1 percent African-American in the tavern, so those (census) numbers don't reflect (the visiting community)."

Similar statistics were found in Green Bay, where a black person is eight times more likely to face arrest than someone who is white. Much lower on the list are sheriff's departments, including Outagamie County (No. 30 on the list), Brown County (No. 40) and Winnebago County (No. 48). Sheriff's departments tended to have fewer arrests per person and smaller black populations under their jurisdiction than police departments.

Even so, in Winnebago County a black person is three times more likely to be arrested than his white, American Indian or Asian peers. Hispanics are included in the white population in national arrest data.

The lowest disproportion of arrests was in Waupun, but those figures are distorted by the Waupun Correctional Institution, which is included in the city's population figures and includes many black inmates.

Four of the five departments with the lowest disproportion rates include prison populations in their census data. In rural Stanley, which has the second-lowest disparity in the state, black men account for 17 percent of the city's population of 3,600, including those behind bars.

Wisconsin has the highest rate of incarceration of black men in the country, nearly doubling the national average at 12.8 percent for black men, according to a 2013 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study. One in eight of Wisconsin's adult black males are in correctional facilities, according to 2010 census data.

Skewed numbers for certain crimes can be indicative of enforcement priorities, Oliver said. Violent crimes tend to elicit a reactive response from police, who speak with witnesses or review surveillance videos to track down a suspect. In those situations, bias is less likely, she said.

"At the lower end of the crime scale, the number of arrests is more related to decisions about where and how to police," Oliver told Gannett Wisconsin Media. "If you see a sudden spike in drunken driving arrests, you don't say to yourself, 'Hey, why are more people driving drunk?' So drunken driving is one that's entirely enforcement driven."

In Racine, black people were about as likely to be arrested for OWI as people of other races. Yet in Milwaukee and Green Bay, black drivers are twice as likely to be arrested as those of other races. Appleton and Wauwatosa had even larger disparities; in the latter, OWI arrest rates stood at 33 per 1,000 black people and 6 for every 1,000 non-blacks.

Drug abuse, shoplifting and disorderly conduct are other enforcement-driven crimes, where police have more discretion over whether to make an arrest, Oliver said. In Appleton, the largest disparity revolved around selling and manufacturing drugs, for which a black person was 20 times more likely to face arrest.

But Lewis — who has also served as police chief in Green Bay, Connecticut and a Los Angeles suburb — said such arrests are often a byproduct of police trying to prevent more serious crimes, such as shootings.

"I'm a proponent of hot-spot policing, sending 40 to 50 people to a (dangerous or threatened) area, make a lot of traffic stops, light up the night," the chief said. "But during that, we find a lot of drug dealers. We know they won't tell us about the shooting, but we're still getting them off the streets, and that retaliation shooting won't occur."

In Appleton, blacks were far more likely to be arrested for violent crimes including rape, robbery, aggravated assault and other assaults. In Wauwatosa, police were 100 times more likely to arrest a black person for robbery and stolen property than someone of another race — meaning that statistically, for every non-black person taken into custody for either crime, there were 100 black people.

It's easy to look at the statistics and assume police are harboring a bias toward blacks, but that's simply not true, Lewis said.

"Of all the industries in the US, (policing) is probably the only area that actually tries to weed out bias before we hire," he said. "We have psychological tests to identify issues of bias, polygraphs, background investigations. We try to weed it out as best we can."

And training continues through a career; just this month, Appleton police and Outagamie County prosecutors requested federal Department of Justice training to prevent unconscious biases in law enforcement. The training would be the first of its kind in northeast Wisconsin.

Instead of focusing on police procedure, Lewis said communities need to look inward and find ways to lessen poverty rates and strengthen access to education and medical care.

"There's no question it's indicative of a problem in the communities, but those numbers are more about society than they are about policing," he said. "If we don't fund correctly to make sure every child is starting off healthy with a good chance, we're just creating our next cycle, and it will just continue."


Department: Appleton PD

Black arrest per 1,000: 1,433

White arrest per 1,000: 137

Department: Fond du Lac PD

Black arrest per 1,000: 757

White arrest per 1,000: 110

Department: Green Bay PD

Black arrest per 1,000: 911

White arrest per 1,000: 114

Department: Milwaukee PD

Black arrest per 1,000: 312

White arrest per 1,000: 65

Department: Oshkosh PD

Black arrest per 1,000: 780

White arrest per 1,000: 147

Department: Sheboygan PD

Black arrest per 1,000: 1,112

White arrest per 1,000: 139

Department: Wausau PD

Black arrest per 1,000: 1,163

White arrest per 1,000: 150

Source: FBI, U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau

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