Dane County CJC staff demonstrate public dashboards showing crime trends, pretrial and jail data

Colleen, a Criminal Justice Council (CJC) staff member, demonstrated a set of public dashboards on crime and criminal justice outcomes for Dane County and Wisconsin during a CJC subcommittee meeting. The presentation covered long-term crime trends, arrest and incarceration snapshots, pretrial status, signature-bond analyses and a corrections dashboard.

The dashboards show a long-term decline in property-crime rates in Dane County across roughly 15–25 years, with a notable temporary spike in some offenses such as car theft before returning to earlier levels. "It's fallen by a third," Colleen said when discussing the change in arrest counts over the last 25 years. The presenter showed interactive filters that allow users to compare Dane County to state trends and to break data down by offense type, year, age, race and gender.

Why it matters: the dashboards are intended as tools for the council and partners to track racial disparities, pretrial outcomes and jail populations and to support evidence-based policy work.

Key findings shown in the presentation

- Race and arrests: Colleen demonstrated a dashboard comparing the county population (shown as 84% White, 6% Black in the presenter’s example) with the racial composition of…