Five years ago, the Wisconsin Legislature passed a law requiring law enforcement agencies to unseal employment records of police officers and deputies who left their departments under negative circumstances. The state Department of Justice has compiled a database of those officers in order for law enforcement agencies to check when considering new hires.
The Madison-based nonpartisan nonprofit The Badger Project checks that information regularly and recently discovered two such officers working in northwest Wisconsin.
“These were both veteran officers that had been in law enforcement for quite a while,” said The Badger Project Managing Editor Peter Cameron.
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Cameron spoke with WPR’s Robin Washington on “Morning Edition” about the report and put it in context with the incidence of “wandering officers” statewide.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Robin Washington: What is the incidence of these hires — or rehires — statewide?
Peter Cameron: There are about 400 officers in Wisconsin currently working in law enforcement who were fired or forced out from another agency in the state.
The number has increased since we first started checking in 2021 — in the last four years by about 50 percent. The reason for it that I’m hearing from chiefs and sheriffs across the state is that it’s just getting harder and harder to hire good people because there’s a cop shortage in Wisconsin and across the country. Fewer people are going into law enforcement.
There’s an incentive to hire these wandering officers, as we call them, because they already have their certification. They’ve already been trained, they can start working right away. But if you hire a new recruit, they have to go through the academy.
Also, it can be particularly hard to hire cops and sheriff’s deputies in rural areas.
RW: Do you have any idea of what the trend is nationally? I’ve always wondered how frequently officers do go from one jurisdiction to another because of Hollywood depictions like “Beverly Hills Cop,” where a guy goes on vacation and suddenly he’s on a case. Can you actually do that between states?
PC: You can, but in Wisconsin, you have to have a Wisconsin law enforcement certificate. You can’t just go work in Minnesota or in Illinois.
We actually have a lawsuit against the State Department of Justice. We’re trying to get a full list of all the law enforcement officers in Wisconsin. The reason why we want that list is so we can see who has been fired or forced out from a different state that has come to Wisconsin.
RW: The 400 you mentioned is the total officers statewide since you’ve been tallying the information, including some in northwest Wisconsin. Now you’ve found two new officers in the region. Where did they come from and why did they leave?
PC: One officer is Matthew Frey. He used to work in western Wisconsin for the Cumberland Police Department. He’s now working at the Hayward Police Department. He resigned in lieu of termination from Cumberland.
There was an investigation that the Cumberland chief performed in which he was accused of cursing at civilians, watching YouTube for hours on end while he was supposed to be working.
In the course of an interview with a suspect, he inadvertently or accidentally revealed that somebody had put a restraining order on that person. So there were lots of civilian complaints against him.
The other officer is in Minong, in Washburn County. It’s only a two-person department. His name is Jeffrey Johnson.
He was the jail administrator in Sawyer County, which was a higher-level job. He was accused of sending photos of his genitalia to female subordinates. It’s unclear whether it was consensual or not; it may have been. But it’s still a person in a position of power sending inappropriate photos to subordinates.
RW: We will stress that these are accusations and neither was convicted of a crime. But that being said, the whole reason that you know about them is they did rise to the level of being documented, correct? There are records on them.
PC: Yes. Both were investigated by their previous employers, and they were both flagged in the Justice Department database. Both resigned in lieu of termination.
RW: This is what they do. This is their career. Shouldn’t there be a second chance for people?
PC: It’s not my job to have opinions; I just get the facts. But I’ll say some people, including many who work in law enforcement, think that law enforcement officers should be held to a higher standard. On the other hand, yeah — everybody deserves a second chance.
One reason we’re doing this is not to get people fired, but for transparency purposes; to let communities know that these are the people that are policing you. And it’s possible that a person that we’ve written about may decide to be on their best behavior going forward.
Note: WPR reached out to the police chiefs in Minong and Hayward for comment and did not receive responses by deadline. Their responses to the hirings are included in Badger Project articles linked above.
If you have an idea about something in northern Wisconsin you think we should talk about on Morning Edition, send it to us at northern@wpr.org.
