DE PERE – De Pere Police Chief Jeremy Muraski credits preparedness and his personnel for the city remaining a safe place, but said the city hasn’t been untouched by mental health crises and drugs.

Muraski gave members of the De Pere Common Council a recap of the past year of policing in the city at the board’s most recent meeting.

Of the De Pere Police Department’s 12,900 calls for service in 2025, 2,004 incidents required formal police reports.

Of those 2,004 reports, 515 were referred to the District Attorney’s office for misdemeanor or felony charges.

Muraski noted that traffic is the department’s most common interaction with the public, followed by crime prevention and welfare checks.

That’s followed by parking complaints, reckless driving complaints, disturbances, animal calls, motorist assists and suspicious situations.

He said that the department now blends traffic enforcement into the duties of patrol and community policing officers rather than dedicating one officer to traffic enforcement, as it did in the past.

Currently, the De Pere Police Department is authorized for 43 full-time employees.

“We’re currently sitting at 42 of those 43 positions,” he said, adding that the department has had a number of retirements and will have another one in September.

He said he has two good candidates to whom he would like to make conditional offers, but will need to come before the finance and personnel committee and Common Council to make a request to overhire one in anticipation of that September retirement.

The current police roster consists of 25 in the patrol division, 10 in the investigations and community policing division, and four in the professional standards and administration division.

The fight against drugs

In 2025, the De Pere Police Department seized 220 potentially lethal doses of fentanyl.

Muraski painted a picture of what the amount seized — 440 milligrams — looks like: 10 or 12 grains of salt.

“That’s all it takes to kill most people when it comes to fentanyl,” he said. “That … potentially saved 220 lives.”

In addition to the 440 mg of fentanyl, the De Pere Police Department also seized 34.6 grams of cocaine, 133 grams of amphetamines/methamphetamines, and 433 grams of THC (slightly less than 16 ounces).

Mental health among biggest challenges

One of the biggest challenges the department faces is the increasing number of mental health and substance abuse calls.

Muraski said it’s estimated that one in every five police calls not just in DePere but nationwide involves a person in a mental health crisis, a substance abuse crisis or a situation involving both.

Those calls are known as emergency medical custody or EM-1 calls, and they seldom can be handled quickly, he said.

A single EM-1 call can take up to 12 hours, especially if it involves a trip down to Oshkosh to the Winnebago Mental Health Center, a trek often necessary due to local capacity issues.

“That’s an awfully long time for somebody to be stuck with one of our officers in police custody in the back of a squad car, visiting a hospital,” Muraski said.

These situations also tend to create more complex calls for the department.
“A call that is more complex in nature might take more than one officer and it might take those two or even three officers many more hours than what would typically have been a simpler call for service,” Muraski said.

He said 84% of officers surveyed listed mental health calls as their top on-the-job challenge.

He said it was a good decision five years ago to hire a social worker, John Bushmaker, and he wishes he could have two of them.

The police social worker assists with mental health calls and can de-escalate certain situations.

Use of force

In 2025, the department had 62 incidents logged as use-of-force incidents.
“That breaks down to less than one-half of 1% — 0.48%,” he said. “That number is extremely good...we obviously hope and pray (we) can stay at that very low level, but that is very good even compared to police departments all across the nation.”

Most departments are in the 1 to 2% range, he said.

“The fact that we’re at less than one-half of 1% for 2025 I believe is outstanding; it shows that our officers are doing everything that they can to use their two most important tools: No. 1, their ears, and No.2, their ability to speak to people,” he said. “If you’re doing those things and de-escalating situations before they turn physical, that’s how you can end a lot of these scenarios without force having to be used.”

That being said, some incidents get logged as use-of-force cases when force hasn’t actually been used.

Two examples he gave: “If an officer displays a Taser and issues a warning but doesn’t actually Tase someone or doesn’t actually deploy darts, we’re still logging that display of the Taser as a warning. It’s logged separately from an actual use of the Taser. The same thing goes with a firearm or handguns. There are times when an officer will display a handgun or a long gun as a warning but obviously not discharge it,” Muraski said.

He touched briefly on a critical incident in July of 2025 involving a fatal shooting by an officer, involving three officers.

Following state statute, the investigation was handed to the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) and the Brown County District Attorney’s office, which ruled the officers’ actions justifiable.

“Our officers tried everything they possibly could to prevent the outcome that ultimately happened,” he said.

It comes back to mental health concerns. “There are cases that despite all the training in the world and the best equipment in the world — and I believe that the De Pere Police Department has great people, we have great equipment, and we have great training — but there are some times when we have outcomes that are just unfortunate. And this was unfortunately one of those scenarios.”

Training for the future

In the past year, the De Pere Police Department participated in and facilitated parts of some multi-jurisdictional, multi-disciplinary, county-wide training.

“That’s the active shooter, the mass casualty, those kinds of incidents where we anticipate having a large number of victims, whether it’s from a natural disaster, a mechanical disaster like a plane crash or a train derailment, or it could be from a bad actor such as an active shooter or somebody using a vehicle in an attack where they’re trying to run multiple people over—things of that nature,” Muraski said.

Those are complicated incidents to deal with, which means they are complicated incidents to train for. It involves not just the police department, but the fire department, emergency medical services, other branches of local government and major stakeholders such as the major hospitals and medical systems, Muraski said.

“But that is something that is going to continue to be a focus all around the county so that we in De Pere and all of our partners around the area are prepared to deal with any of those kinds of incidents.”