Wausau Police Department. Image courtesy: WAOW TV
WAUSAU, WI (WSAU-WAOW) – A new report shows traffic citations and warnings have continued to drop significantly since 2019.
According to Wausau Police Chief Matt Barnes, while the numbers are important, he believes this is more for holding the department accountable to the community, saying, “Every police department throughout the country receives its authority to police from the community, and so the community needs to, in order to feel good about their police department and trust their police department, we need to be transparent and share with them information about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.”
The only increase from 2023 to any other year was for traffic warnings. Over 4,000 citations and 4,100 warnings were issued in 2023, but the report also highlights each department member, as well as their public contacts and events.
These numbers come as the city continues to look for options to decrease the local homeless population, which Chief Barnes said could double this year if action isn’t taken, saying, “From our warming shelter run by Catholic Charities, we saw between 330 and 350 unduplicated individuals seek shelter last year, which is a great metric for us to be able to measure how many people had experienced the issue at different times in our community,” and continued by saying, “I think when we look at the number of new people we’ve seen in just the first few months of this year, I would expect that number to double.”
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