A court sided with The Badger Project and the Invisible Institute in their lawsuit demanding a list of all police in the state from the Department of Justice, which had repeatedly rejected requests for it.
By Annie Pulley, THE BADGER PROJECT
Open records advocates have landed a major legal victory for transparency in Wisconsin.
In a decision released Tuesday, a Dane County court sided with The Badger Project and its co-plaintiff, the Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based journalism organization, in their lawsuit demanding that the state Department of Justice release the names and work history of every certified law enforcement officer in the state.
“We are pleased with Judge (Rhonda) Lanford’s ruling,” wrote Tom Kamenick, the lead attorney and founder of the Wisconsin Transparency Project, a law firm dedicated to enforcing the state’s open records law. “This decision is a powerful victory for the right of the public to know who has been entrusted with a badge and a gun.”
The journalism organizations filed the lawsuit in 2023 when the state DOJ partially denied their request for the policing data. The department cited safety and privacy concerns, especially for undercover officers. The data requested would include an officer’s name, birthday or birth year, zip code, and his or her work history. Home addresses were not requested.
In response to the denial, The Badger Project and Invisible Institute sued in 2024. The plaintiffs argued that since undercover officers don’t use their true names, releasing them wouldn’t put them in jeopardy.
The state DOJ’s 2023 denial was “unlawful,” the court wrote in the opinion released Tuesday.
Citing an earlier decision, the judge noted that 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.”
The Wisconsin Department of Justice has consistently denied requests for this list of law enforcement officers over the years, including in 2019, when the Invisible Institute made its first request. That time, the department made an effort to fulfill the request, but eventually rejected it after facing resistance from law enforcement agencies and policing groups, according to documents The Badger Project received during the course of its 2023 lawsuit.
The state DOJ responded to The Badger Project’s request for comment with copies of the agency’s legal briefs filed in 2025.
“Petitioners asked for records that would reveal the identities of approximately 16,000 law enforcement officers in Wisconsin, including officers who work undercover or whose identities warrant protection for other reasons, as well as sensitive information that would create a risk of identity theft,” the state DOJ argued in its brief.
The agency did not respond to a question asking whether the agency would appeal the court’s decision.
The records request stems from the Invisible Institute and its National Police Index project, which seeks to create a national database of police officers throughout the country. Wisconsin was one of 14 states that hadn’t provided the names and work histories of police officers due to legal barriers.
The point of having a comprehensive list is to better track wandering officers – cops and jailers who leave one law enforcement job under negative circumstances just to be hired at another. Especially those who cross state lines.
“So-called ‘wandering officers’ have presented a significant danger to residents of every state, and an impediment to lasting police accountability,” wrote Chaclyn Hunt, the legal director of Invisible Institute, in a statement. “We look forward to making data in Wisconsin accessible on the National Police Index, a tool that Invisible Institute co-created that allows all stakeholders within a given state to view the employment history of officers for their city, town, village or college.”
The lawsuit
The news organizations’ lawsuit was mainly funded by The National Freedom of Information Coalition, through grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Legal Defense Fund.
The suit was argued by Kamenick and Lena Shapiro, director of the University of Illinois College of Law’s First Amendment Clinic.
The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.
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