The purpose of this interactive dashboard is to provide a high-level overview of information for criminal cases as required by Wis. Stat. §165.845(1r)(f). The dashboard contains data sourced from the REST Interface of the Wisconsin Circuit Court Access (WCCA) and the Wisconsin DOJ’s Centralized Criminal History Repository (CCH).
The data or information provided is not the official records of the court. Data provided from WCCA Information may not reflect the most current disposition activity. Users should verify the data and information by consulting the official court record maintained by the court in question. The official custodian of all official circuit court records in Wisconsin is the clerk of circuit court or register in probate.
Please note: The dashboard provides the most recent version of a charge that was filed as of the data refresh date; if the original filing was amended, the original charges do not appear on the dashboard. Court officials and prosecuting attorneys named on the dashboard are the most recent people assigned to the case as of the data refresh date. These individuals may not have made decisions about charging and may not have been the ones assigned to the case at disposition. The case data are aggregated to protect personally identifiable information as required by 2025 Wisconsin Act 45. It does not include information related to workload analysis, programs, policies, and/or practices of each district attorney’s office or court, resources, or case specific information. Questions related to those issues should be directed to the district attorney’s office or court for more information.
This project was supported by Grant No. 15PBJA-22-GG-03801-JRIX, awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Office for Victims of Crime, and the SMART Office. Points of view or opinions in this dashboard are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Definitions
- Crime: Per Wis. Stat. § 939.12, a crime is “conduct which is prohibited by state law and punishable by fine or imprisonment or both. Conduct punishable by a forfeiture is not a crime.” Cases that only involve ordinances are not included as they are not “crimes.”
- Arrest: An arrest (or arrest event) for the purposes of this dashboard are events in which a person is booked and their fingerprints are sent to the Wisconsin CCH. An arrest can have multiple arrest charges. This information is from the law enforcement perspective and represents what statute(s) the arrestee has allegedly violated. Note: Not all arrests are submitted to the CCH. Some court cases do not have associated arrests because the arrest was not submitted to the CCH. The CCH only accepts arrests that include fingerprints.
- Arrest charge: Arrest charges are the specific statutes/ordinance violations that law enforcement includes with an arrest event. There can be many arrest charges with a single arrest event. The arrest charges come from law enforcement and may not be identical to the charges law enforcement refers to the District Attorney’s office. Ordinance violations that are not “crimes” may still appear as arrest charges on the dashboard if the arrest event led to a criminal case with misdemeanor/felony charge(s) filed.
- Filed charge: Filed charges are those which the District Attorney’s office have filed with the courts. These may not be the same as the arrest charge(s). The charges filed can change over time, and the dashboard includes the version of the filed charges as of the data refresh date. The cases containing the filed charges are only included in the dashboard if the filed charge(s) include at least one misdemeanor or felony. Only “crimes” are included in the court charge overview.
- Disposition: Dispositions are the outcomes and/or current status of court cases. The specific possible dispositions are located on the Notes page of the dashboard. Because there are so many, the BJIA has created categories for the dispositions, such as “guilty,” “pending disposition,” “amended,” etc.
- Offense Categories and Subcategories: These categories were created by the BJIA and do not appear in the court case data. They are included for ease of filtering for similar crimes for users not familiar with statutes or statute language. The BJIA previously mapped statutes to these categories for the purposes of program evaluations. Categories were created in close alignment with those included in the Wisconsin Statewide Drug and Hybrid Court Performance Measures (Appendix C) created by the National Center for State Courts.
- Court Officials and Prosecutors: These individuals are those who were assigned to the case at the time of the data refresh date. Note: the person assigned at the time of the refresh date may not have made any decisions about charges filed, pleas, etc. and may not have presided over the case while it was open.
Juveniles: Cases involving juveniles who were treated as juveniles in court are not included.
Counting
The count of cases and charges is often different due to different levels of aggregation. For example, if a user were to select Wis. Stat. § 943.32(3) Armed Robbery on the court charge overview, the count of cases is a unique count of cases in which that statute was charged at least once. The count of charges is a non-unique count of charges under that statute. The count of charges will often be greater than the count of cases because there can be multiple charges for the same statute under the same case. Dispositions are based on the disposition of the charge(s) on the case; for example, if one case has multiple charges and at least one of them was “guilty”, it will appear as 1 case with a guilty disposition. If the case had 5 different charges all with guilty dispositions, it will appear as 5 guilty charges. Each charge can have more than one disposition, so adding the different dispositions separately may result in a number greater than the number of charges displayed.
Disclaimer
Notice to employers: It may be a violation of state law to discriminate against a job applicant because of an arrest or conviction record. Generally speaking, an employer may refuse to hire an applicant on the basis of a conviction only if the circumstances of the conviction substantially relate to the particular job. For more information, see Wis. Stat. § 111.335 and the Department of Workforce Development’s Arrest and Conviction Records under the Law publication.