A new investigative report has found that the Wisconsin Department of Justice is years behind in reporting crime data to the public.

The investigation revealed that the state Justice Department's website has not published crime data since 2012, lagging surrounding states and the federal government. The report alleges that the delay is "due to a sluggish overhaul" by the department.

Keegan Kyle led the investigation that appeared this week in the Appleton Post-Crescent, as well as in Gannett newspapers across the state. He said Schimel urged the department to update the website soon after taking office in early 2015.

It's been a year now, said Kyle, and the DOJ has yet to update the state's website with new software in order to make the data available to the public. He said that the department plans to update the website sometime in the next three months and publish crime data from 2013, possibly along with more recent figures.

Meanwhile, without access to the data, Kyle wrote in his story that Wisconsinites have an "outdated view of crime patterns in their communities and fewer tools to track what local law enforcement agencies are doing to keep them safe."

The lack of access to data also means journalists are less able to hold police departments accountable, said Kyle. In addition, law enforcement agencies lack a tool to evaluate whether their tactics are effective in deterring crime and keeping communities safe.

While law enforcement officials often discuss overall crime incident reports at community meetings, Kyle said they often neglect to offer data that reflects their job performance.

"Arrest statistics and crime-solving statistics are a lot less common to be talked about," Kyle told Wisconsin Public Radio. "And those are the ones that sometimes can be much more revealing about what tactics they're using to really fight different types of crimes in the community."

Kyle said his investigative team discovered the outdated crime statistics when reporting for a separate story about the nearly 6,000 untested rape kits throughout the state. That investigation hit a wall, he said, when they couldn't trace how many of the tests were correlated to unsolved cases due to the lack of new data.