Judge orders release of Wisconsin police officer names

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The Wisconsin Department of Justice must release the names of all law enforcement officers in the state, a Dane County circuit judge ruled April 28.

Judge Rhonda Lanford sided with two news organizations – the Chicago-based Invisible Institute and the Wisconsin-based Badger Project – in their lawsuit filed after the DOJ denied a public records request for the names, ages, badge numbers and employment history of the state’s 16,000 law enforcement officers.

The Invisible Institute has made similar records requests across the country as part of an investigative reporting project on police accountability. So far, it has published law enforcement officers’ names in 24 states.

The news organizations are using the data in part to track “wandering officers” – law enforcement officers who resigned or were fired due to misconduct at one agency and have since been hired by another agency, sometimes across state lines.

The state Department of Justice declined to comment on the decision, instead pointing to a brief filed by Attorney General Josh Kaul in May 2025. In the brief, Kaul called releasing the records “reckless,” saying it could put undercover officers in danger.

“[Without] knowing how each agency treats the release of information about its officers, it would be contrary to the public interest for DOJ to disclose information that could threaten current, non-DOJ law enforcement efforts or adversely affect the officers or agencies,” Kaul wrote.

Tom Kamenick, one of the lead attorneys for the news organizations, pointed out that dozens of other states have released this information to the public.

“We don’t like the idea of secret police,” he said. “We think the public should get to know who is licensed to carry a gun and a badge and enforce the law in the state of Wisconsin.”

Kamenick, who runs the Wisconsin Transparency Project, a law firm focused on enforcing the state’s Open Records laws, added that the state did not provide concrete examples of how undercover officers would be put in danger.

“Undercover officers don’t use their real names, so seeing their real name on a list of law enforcement officers doesn’t connect the dots that that is an undercover law enforcement officer,” Kamenick said.

Lanford agreed, writing that the DOJ “made no effort to assess whether the specific information sought in Invisible’s 2023 request would pose threats to individual officers.”

“Law enforcement officers ‘necessarily relinquish certain privacy and reputational rights by virtue of the amount of trust society places in them and must be subject to public scrutiny,’” Lanford wrote in her decision.

The Wisconsin Professional Police Association said it was “deeply concerned” by the ruling and said it could undermine recruitment and retention efforts.

“While we recognize and respect the important role that transparency plays in maintaining public trust, this ruling goes beyond transparency and raises serious concerns about officer safety, privacy, and the unintended consequences of aggregating sensitive information into a single, easily accessible database,” the association said in a statement.

The association said it expects the decision will be appealed. The lawsuit has been ongoing for nearly two years.

In response to the news organizations’ initial records request, the DOJ released a list of people in the agency’s Division of Criminal Investigation and its list of “flagged” law enforcement officers – those who were terminated, resigned in lieu of termination, or resigned prior to completion of an internal investigation.

This was not enough, Kamenick argued, since law enforcement officers could have a history of misconduct in other states but get rehired in Wisconsin and have no record here.

The Wisconsin DOJ has argued that it would be an undue burden to assemble the full list of law enforcement officers’ names and the other requested information.

“Even assuming that DOJ could contact all 571 local law enforcement agencies with an initial single email, it would nevertheless need to track the positive substantive responses of each agency, track the negative substantive responses of the other agencies, and track the non-responses of the remaining agencies,” Kaul wrote in the May 2025 brief.

However, the news organizations argued that the department has done so before. Court documents show that the DOJ was planning to release the list of names back in 2020 and had contacted hundreds of local law enforcement agencies to check if any redactions were necessary. Ultimately, it did not release the list.

This lawsuit is one of several by the Invisible Institute over the past few years against states that withheld similar records. The news organization is currently in litigation in Montana and Michigan. It lost its case in Colorado.

Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, a statewide group that works to protect public access to government meetings and records, said nothing in Wisconsin’s records law would differentiate it from other states that released the information.

“We know from the work that the Badger Project has done that oftentimes problematic officers find a way to get rehired, and that’s a legitimate area of inquiry for the media and others who care about public safety,” Lueders said.