Deadly police encounters in Wisconsin spiked last year and are on pace this year to surpass the modern record of 26 fatalities set in 2017.

The increase comes after Wisconsin Watch and The Badger Project reported two years ago that Wisconsin’s rate of police killings ranked among the lowest in the nation over the past decade. In the last two years, the rate has increased, especially compared to neighboring countries.

There were at least 24 fatal encounters last year, up from 14 the previous year. So far this year, the death toll is at least 19, according to a review by Wisconsin Watch. That surpasses Illinois, which has more than twice as many residents.

Local district attorneys have determined that virtually all instances of police use of force were justified. But the increased rate of fatal encounters has led law enforcement accountability advocates to call for more government oversight.

Russell Beckman, a retired Kenosha detective turned police reform activist, said he fears police killings now carry less of a stigma and the justice system is allowing police safety to trump public safety.

“A shot can be legal — justified — a legally justified shot,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it was necessary.”

The state’s largest police union does not dispute the rising death toll but says police mostly respond to people who are armed or believed to be armed — threatening officers or bystanders.

“I don’t think there’s a good explanation,” said Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association.

Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, told reporters earlier this summer that the increase is “mostly related to the number of incidents where force has to be used because of the circumstances.”

Wisconsin Watch’s tally of at least 19 fatal encounters matches figures from Mapping Police Violence, a research collaboration that has tracked such data since 2013. Over the 11-year time frame, about three out of four fatal encounters in Wisconsin involved a person with an alleged weapon, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of the collaboration’s data.

But since the pandemic, the percentage of cases involving a gun has been lower than in neighboring states, while the percentage involving a mental health crisis has increased, the analysis found.

The majority of this year’s in-custody deaths involved the shootings of suspects judged to be threatening. In some cases, prosecutors found such violence justified even if the officers disregarded the best methods of de-escalation.

The Rice Lake Police Department’s crisis intervention protocol calls for attempted de-escalation before resorting to deadly force. They instruct officers not to “argue, raise their voices, or use threats to obtain compliance.”

That’s not what happened last October when responding officers shot and killed Zachary Veitch, 50, at a public housing complex after he allegedly attacked a neighbor with a knife and then fled.

Paramedics had already treated the stabbing victim for injuries when police entered Veitch’s apartment and threatened to use a barking police dog if Veitch did not come out of his bedroom. Thirty seconds later they forced open Veitch’s bedroom door. He lunged with a knife and police shot him dead in his kitchen.

A retired police officer who reviewed the redacted investigation questioned the rush to use lethal force against a man alone in his own apartment.

“I didn’t see them trying to establish any kind of dialogue,” said John Wallschlaeger, who retired from the Appleton Police Department and has long trained crisis intervention teams across Wisconsin.

Barron County District Attorney Brian Wright ruled that officers acted reasonably and praised them for protecting themselves and other residents of the apartment complex.

The DOJ does not publish statistics on when mental illness was evident in an encounter, but Mapping Police Violence found that those killed by police showed signs of a crisis in at least 14 of 43 fatal police encounters since early 2023.

The increase in fatal police encounters does not correspond to an increase in violent crime. An analysis of DOJ crime data shows that violent crime increased in 2021 but has decreased every year since.

Advocates for police reform have expressed concern over the rising death toll in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin remains below the national average per capita for fatal police encounters, according to Mapping Police Violence. Even so, over the past decade the state has often exceeded the prices of its neighbors.

Illinois, with twice as many residents, has seen a sharp drop in fatal police encounters with at least 16 so far this year, three fewer than in Wisconsin.

Advocates for police reform point to the Chicago model, which in 2016 empowered the Civilian Office of Police Accountability to investigate complaints of misconduct and custodial and arrest-related deaths.

Illinois lawmakers later passed laws to harmonize use-of-force policies, require officers to intervene if they detect excessive force, and make police records readily available.

“When officers see other officers lose their jobs, lose money, lose pay because of their failure or refusal to follow the core de-escalation policies — you change your mind,” said Craig Futterman, a clinical professor of law at the University of Chicago and founder of the clinic for civil rights and police accountability.

Deadly police encounters remain a nationwide challenge with more than 1,350 deaths last year and 2024 on pace to match that amount.

For decades, forensic experts say, police and paramedics have cited “excited delirium” — a widely discredited diagnosis accused of justifying excessive violence in cases across the country.

The conflation of force with emergency medical care frustrates other crisis intervention experts who see mixed messages in the training to respond to agitated and mentally ill subjects.

“On the one hand, you train officers to slow things down,” said Amy Watson, a mental health researcher at Wayne State University who has studied fatal police encounters. “But if someone is really, really upset,” she said, officers are instructed to use overwhelming force and have medics use tranquilizers.

That was likely a factor when officers responded to Eric VanSyoc’s Kaukauna home in October 2023 and found his wife dead. Officers fired a Taser, sat on his back for six minutes and injected him with ketamine. His breathing became labored and he died in the hospital.

“I suspect their training was inadequate to warn them both of the dangers of supine restraint and of the risks associated with sedation with ketamine,” said EMS trainer Eric Jaeger, who has helped other states improve safety protocols.

Outagamie County District Attorney Melinda Tempelis cleared the police in his death, saying “it is clear that VanSyoc was experiencing a state of excited delirium which in and of itself can cause acute distress and sudden death due to the methamphetamine and designer drugs he consumed prior to police” arrival .”

Major medical organizations in the United States have now rejected “excited delirium” as a scientific concept.

State officials say they are working to remove the term “excited delirium” from law enforcement handbooks. Yet even recently updated material refers to a “freight train to death,” a similar concept that the DOJ’s director of police training and standards said conveys the urgent need to medically attend to an agitated person.

Kaukauna Police Chief Jamie Graff defended his officers’ assessment and response, noting that their training is “consistent with the standards set forth by the Wisconsin Training and Standards Board.”

Independent experts said a factor not mentioned in official documents may have contributed to the death: forcing VanSyoc to lie prone with an officer’s weight on his back even after he stopped struggling.

“It’s been well known for many decades that you shouldn’t make people lie on their stomachs,” said Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at Harvard University and a researcher at the Center for Policing Equity. “You should at least put them on their side.”

Since 2021, state law has required the Justice Department to publicly report in-custody deaths, arrests and use of force. But the department’s data set — which relies on law enforcement to report incidents — remains incomplete and often misleading, obscuring precise trends.

The online database tabulates reports by agency, meaning multiple records may describe the same incident, depending on how many agencies responded. At least one fatal shooting that resulted in the death of 40-year-old Sherman D. Solomon on September 13, 2022 by Milwaukee police was not listed even though the department made the incident public.

DOJ spokeswoman Gillian Drummond would not comment on the omission, nor would she say how the agency evaluates its use of force data or looks at the increasing trends.

“We follow state statutes,” she said. “The data is online for the public to review.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which lobbied for the state’s use-of-force reporting law, said the DOJ is failing in its duty to accurately track police violence and publish accurate findings.

“It’s really troubling when there are apparently incidents that would fall under statutory reporting requirements, and they don’t come up,” said Amanda Merkwae, advocacy director for the ACLU of Wisconsin.

“It just seems like part of the pattern of individual law enforcement agencies fighting for transparency, as much as they can.”

Wisconsin Watch data reporter Khushboo Rathore contributed to this report. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) partners with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication.