Keegan Kyle

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

MADISON - State authorities launched a revamped crime statistics website Tuesday, ending a three-year drought in which Wisconsin had gradually fallen behind many states in publishing basic crime information.

The state’s new website allows Wisconsinites to search how many crimes were reported and how many arrests were made by more than 380 local police agencies. The state plans to release additional crime information in the coming months.

For now, one common window into police activities missing from the website is arrests by race. It's impossible to see whether demographic arrest patterns vary across the state or for certain types of crimes, such as drug possession.

Such data would be of immediate interest to civil rights advocates, criminologists, lawmakers and the news media. Wisconsin has gained national attention in recent years over figures showing disproportionate incarceration rates and arrest rates for blacks, particularly black men.

Policing the USA

State authorities have also yet to publish statistics showing how often police officers are assaulted or how often local police agencies solve crimes, a primary metric that agencies and community officials use to gauge effectiveness and budget needs.

Attorney General Brad Schimel’s Department of Justice produced the new website as part of a $56,000 federal grant. Constance Kostelac, the department's top data official, said statistics showing arrests by race, officer injuries, crime solving and more will be released by the state but it's uncertain when.

"We are currently prioritizing the next pieces of the (website) so we don’t have a specific release date yet," she wrote in an email to USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. "We wanted to launch these two and ask for feedback as we are designing the additional dashboards. This is intended to be an ongoing development where we add additional data and views of the data as the project moves forward."

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin reported in January that Department of Justice authorities planned to overhaul the state’s previous crime statistics website, calling it tedious to update and incompatible with modern internet browsers. The most recent data on the website was from 2012, placing Wisconsin years behind its neighbors and the FBI.

The state’s new website, located at doj.state.wi.us, contains crime data from 2011 through 2014 and is more user-friendly than its predecessor. It is now easier for visitors to view multiyear trends or regional crime patterns, and possible to download huge swaths of data.

It's also now easier for Department of Justice officials to update the website with new information, Kostelac said. The state's 2015 batch of crime statistics is scheduled to arrive before June.

While the previous website was custom-made, the new one relies on a Seattle-based software company, Tableau. Some advice to mobile-savvy readers though: This website is best viewed on computers or tablets.

Department of Justice officials have called the overhaul part of a broader push by Schimel to increase government transparency and efficiency in statistical reporting by law enforcement agencies. The new website was scheduled to be available by the end of March but overshot that mark by about two weeks.

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