Keegan Kyle

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

MADISON - A new state crime website shows police officers from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire have aggressively cracked down on marijuana use in recent years, logging hundreds of more arrests than most of their UW System peers.

But don’t freak out, UW-Eau Claire students.

UW-Eau Claire Police Chief David Sprick looked into those numbers at the request of USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin and found a different sort of pattern.

“When we saw these numbers yesterday, we thought these cannot be right,” Sprick said. “The (correct) numbers are much, much lower than previously reported.”

It turns out that scores of marijuana-related arrests reported by UW-Eau Claire police to state authorities never happened. While the agency logged more than 500 arrests from 2010 through 2014, it has records of making fewer than a dozen each year. More often offenders are issued citations or “diverted” to anti-drug programs.

“The (revised) totals should put us between Oshkosh and Stout for total marijuana enforcement, which makes sense,” Sprick said. “Oshkosh is a similar-sized institution to UW-Eau Claire.”

Here’s a look at the number of reported marijuana-related arrests from 2010 to 2014 by UW police departments

UW-Eau Claire stands out even more when the figures are adjusted for differences in student population.

Sprick said he could only speculate how the agency’s arrest statistics ballooned so much — possibly from a worker mistakenly “double counting” cases as they moved through the criminal justice system. He said the worker who previously compiled statistics for the agency left in October.

UW-Eau Claire police, like other law enforcement agencies across the state, recently switched from a paper-based to a web-based reporting system for crime statistics. Sprick said the new system gives him more confidence in the agency’s reporting.

“I think we’re in a much better place now in being accurate,” he said. “We appreciate you calling this to our attention. We were not aware that these were so skewed.”

Keegan Kyle is an investigative reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. He can be reached at kkyle@gannett.com or on Twitter @keegankyle.

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