Despite headline-grabbing crimes such as the 2006 Weston Schools shooting by then-15-year-old Eric Hainstock, a move toward tougher penalties for juvenile offenders and the ever-present hand-wringing over "kids today," a State Journal review of Wisconsin arrest statistics from 1997 through 2006 shows juvenile arrests, including those for serious crimes, have dropped significantly.

Law enforcement officials say the decrease is not one they've noted in their day-to-day work, but could be related to an increased emphasis in the last 10 to 15 years on reaching at-risk juveniles before they commit crimes, as well as efforts to get kids who commit minor offenses back on the right track before they get into more serious trouble.

"I think part of the credit to that statewide drop is there's been more proactive enforcement," said R.J. Lurquin, a Dane County Sheriff's deputy and president of the Wisconsin Sheriffs and Deputy Sheriffs Association.

Experts who have studied state arrest data, however, say changes in arrests over time can have as much or more to do with changes in societal attitudes toward crime and new approaches to crime by police, as well as with how arrests are counted.

Three arrest categories

Wisconsin's more than 350 police jurisdictions are required to report their arrests annually using guidelines set by the FBI.

When it comes to those 17 and younger, three broad categories of arrests are tabulated and reported by the state Office of Justice Assistance: index arrests, for serious offenses such as murder and rape; nonindex arrests for all other less-serious offenses; and status violations (a subset of nonindex arrests), for things such as curfew violations and runaways.

Each of these categories showed overall decreases from 1997 to 2006 — the most recent year for which data are available — as did all but two of 16 specific types of crime tracked by OJA over time. Murder arrests, for example, showed the largest percentage drop, falling 71 percent from 78 arrests in 1997 to 23 in 2006. But runaway calls fell dramatically over that period, too, from 9,075 to 4,778.

The only two of the 16 offenses tracked in which there were increases from 1997 to 2006, according to OJA data, were drug offenses (4,936 to 5,088) and drunken driving (543 to 786).

Reflects national trend

The drop in juvenile arrests in Wisconsin mirrors a drop in crime nationally beginning in the mid-1990s, according to Ken Streit, who studies juvenile crime issues as a clinical associate professor at the UW-Madison Law School.

What's behind that broader trend is a matter researchers still can't decide on, though.

"It's like throwing spaghetti on the wall," Streit said of assigning reasons for the change. "It's really hard for any one school of thought to claim victory."

In Wisconsin, candidates to explain the drop in adult crime include "prison-building crazy" policymakers during the 1990s, Streit said. There's also been a cyclical change in the public's fear of crime generally, he said.

Fears about the coming emergence of juvenile "superpredators" in the 1990s failed to live up to their billing, for example, and attention to crime began to wane, Streit said.

That led to less of an emphasis on punitive approaches to juvenile crime among policymakers and police.

"At the local level, I think a lot of police officers were saying this doesn't make a lot of sense for kids," Streit said, and the focus shifted to getting young offenders into diversion programs.

Prevention and outreach

Indeed, the start of the decrease in juvenile crime roughly corresponds with greater efforts by law enforcement toward prevention and outreach in the mid-1990s, according to Lurquin, the Dane County deputy.

"We're trying to educate kids on the front end," he said.

Total arrests by Dane County's largest law enforcement agency, the Madison Police Department, dropped from 4,107 in 1997 to 3,896 in 2006. Arrests for the most serious crimes identified in FBI crime reporting guidelines also fell.

Work by people such as Cindy Holmes, a community deputy with the Dane County Sheriff's Office, may have something to do with such changes.

The community deputy program was started in 1997, she said, and there are eight other people in her position. She said she spends about half her time working with juveniles, especially those who come into repeat contact with police, and her job gives her the resources and time to follow up on cases.

Madison police also do many of the same things with juveniles.

Madison acting public information officer Howard Payne said officers in the department's Neighborhood Officers program are required to be versed in things such as the Neighborhood Intervention Program, which is run by the Dane County Department of Human Services and offers services including electronic monitoring of troubled youth coupled with positive activities and discussion groups.

Referrals to programs such as drug treatment as well as alternative adjudication processes such as the retail theft impact panel run by Youth Services of Southern Wisconsin are examples of the new emphasis on treatment, rather than punishment, Holmes said.

Ed Whealon, Shawano police chief and president of the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association, said the apparent decrease in juvenile crime is not something he hears about from other police chiefs.

Still, "I think a lot of departments have taken a proactive stance" toward juvenile crime, he said, such as by putting more police officers in schools.

Arrests counted twice

Although the picture painted by 10 years of juvenile arrest statistics is a positive one, Stan Stojkovic, dean of the UW Milwaukee Helen Bader School of Social Welfare, cautioned that OJA's juvenile data "comes with many caveats."

In a 1996 study of minority incarceration rates, Stojkovic and three colleagues found that many police agencies inadvertently inflated arrest numbers by counting contacts with juveniles as arrests or by counting actual arrests twice. The latter could happen when a juvenile offender was arrested by one agency, then transferred to another, which would also record the arrest, said Rick Lovell, one of the researchers and a UW Milwaukee criminal justice associate professor.

"How the criminal justice system measures juvenile crime is much more powerful" than the actual incidence of juvenile crime, said Stojkovic, who added the state may have addressed problems he and his colleagues found.

David Steingraber, OJA executive director, acknowledges that there have been some "long-standing problems with the reporting of juvenile arrests" and he attributes them to a law enforcement training program run by the UW Extension in the 1970s and 1980s that emphasized documenting all contacts police had with juveniles.

But he said the problem shows up mostly in the numbers for status, or less-serious, offenses; data on index, or the most serious offenses, is likely to be more accurate.

FBI audits of the state data in 2000 and 2006 also have shown "zero arrest data inconsistencies," according to Ryan Sugden, public affairs officer for OJA.