 Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. My name is Adam Payne, Sheboygan County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Mike Vanderstien. And as you know, every month we try to cover one of our 22 departments, and today we're very pleased to have with us our District Attorney, Joe DiCecco. Well, thank you for having me. Thanks for joining us. Joe is a tremendously busy department head. In fact, we don't have him on here every year. But I think since 2006, since we've had the pleasure of him joining us, you certainly follow him perhaps in the press and the very important work he does. And today Joe is going to talk a little bit about the roles and responsibilities of the District Attorney's office. So, Joe, please start sharing with our viewers a little bit about yourself and when you became the District Attorney. Well, I'm from New England. As many people can tell from my accent, I went to UW Madison Law School. And once I was about to graduate there, I found out about the reciprocal agreement where, if you stayed in the State of Wisconsin Practice Law, you wouldn't have to take a bar exam. I thought, well, that sounds pretty good. And so, and I always wanted to be a prosecutor. I didn't want to do any other type of law. And I was fortunate to find a job in Sheboyne County and began here as an Assistant District Attorney on September 5th of 1989. I've been here ever since. In 2002, I ran and was elected as District Attorney. And I've been District Attorney up to this time. When you started in the District Attorney's office in 1989, what made you decide to run? And just so our viewers are clear, you know, this is an elected position. How often do you need to run? How long is the term, a little bit of background? Well, the term for a long time has been two years. And this is the first four-year term. I believe almost all the state constitutional officers, which I'm one of, now have four-year terms. Which makes it better because even no longer, you know, sooner when the election begin your term, it's time to think about running for a reelection, whether or not you have an opponent. And so I think the four-year term is a good idea. And I believe it also is translated to the sheriff's a four-year term. These, I believe the county clerk, the county truck, they're all four-year terms, now they were two-year terms. So that's good. I just decided that things need to be changed in the office in Iran. And the DA at the time, Bob Wells, decided he wanted to do something else. And so I was elected DA in 2002 and began serving in 2003. Very good. And how would you describe your roles and responsibilities? Well, our office is responsible for prosecuting all crimes that occur in the county of Sheboygan. And we also have other responsibilities. For example, there are statutes that require us to prosecute non-criminal violations, traffic tickets and things of that nature for the Sheboygan County Sheriff's Department, for the Wisconsin State Patrol, and for the Department of Natural Resources. So we do a lot of the typical things that Municipal Court might do for municipal agencies. We do that for the Sheriff's Department, for the State Patrol, and for the DNR. We're also required to perform a number of actions in the juvenile court. Juveniles who are alleged to have committed a crime, obviously we don't call it a crime, we call it a delinquent act, but have violated a criminal statute. They're called delinquents. We prosecute them. We do children in need of protection of services. Children have been abused. We do juveniles in need of protection of services, mostly truancies. We do termination of parental rights when a situation gets to the point where the human services is looking for a person's rights as a parent to be terminated so the child can be adopted by a family. We do those two as well. So we have quite a serving on our plate of the requirements that we have to do. And with the vast responsibilities that you have, how many employees do you have? How do you get this all done? Well, we have eight prosecutors, including myself, seven to full time, one is halftime. We have 15 county employees, two of whom are the check fraud people, which I think we'll talk about in a little bit. And the rest of them are professional support staff, paralegals, legal secretaries, persons who assist us in all the paperwork generated by our duties. And again, one of 22 departments in Sheboygan County, though you're an elected department head, elected official, you have both, you have 15, as you said, county employees in the office. That's correct. But you have a budget that's comprised of county property tax levy and state funding. That's correct. All the prosecutors' salaries and benefits are paid for by the state. But everything else, including the county employees' salaries and benefits and the infrastructure, the actual building, the place where we have in the courthouse, the day-to-day operating costs are all part of a county budget. And so I'm fond of saying that when times get tough, we not only get restrictions from the county, but we also get it from the state as well. So it's kind of a double-edged sword that we have to really look at both of them and make some type of compromise to efficiently do our work. Right. And as you and I, and certainly Chairman Van Der Stee knows, when time gets tough, generally your workload increases because more crime is going on in the community. And that's true to some degree. But what really is going on in the community now, and I think this last trial we had, the homicide trial highlighted some of that, is the influx of drug dealers in Sheboygan County. And not only the drugs they bring in here, which wouldn't be possible if people didn't buy them and help them out here, but also as in that last case, the type of violence they bring up here as well. So that is probably my main concern now is this influx from other areas of some people that are potentially very violent. So as you described the relationship of your office with the county and with the state, where does the state attorney general fit in? The state attorney general does a number of things for us. They don't directly supervise us, but they do have some statutory requirements. One is that any appeal concerning constitutional law must be okayed by them. So if we go into court and we get a statement of a defendant suppressed for Miranda violation, I think most people know what Miranda is, and we want to appeal that to a higher court than court of appeals, we can't do that on our own. We have to apply to the attorney general's office so that there's a statewide level of cases, that is so that the attorney general can keep an eye on these type of cases on a statewide level and pursue those cases which I think are important and not pursue those which they think are not either winnable or they don't think believe it should be appealed. And also the attorney general gives opinions. He'll give opinions which are binding on us as far as what our law may mean. For example, a little while ago he gave an opinion on what the second amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution meant as far as the right to bear arms. His opinion was concerning the practice in other counties, not in this county, of people being charged with disorderly conduct for openly carrying a firearm. His opinion was that that is absent any other problem that's not appropriate. It violates the Wisconsin Constitution. District attorneys would be obligated to follow that opinion given by whatever attorney general happens to be in this case is J.B. Van Hollen. So we have that type of relationship, also the great resource for us. We don't ask for them to prosecute our cases. That's a possibility. In some counties, particularly up north where there's only the district attorney, that's all there is, and they may get a homicide case. In fact, there was a shooting a few years ago. The attorney general's office criminal division prosecuted that. They assist in those type of things and they also do all the sexual offender laws. That is the people who are being committed under Chapter 980 as persons who have committed sexual offence, their term is up. They're not on the supervision anymore, whatever they had, and now the state is seeking to keep them civilly committed because of the dangerousness to either children or to other people, and they do that as well. So they help us out in some things. We don't have a direct supervisory relationship with them, except in the appellate process, and they're a great resource for us as well. So to summarize, you're elected by the people, a four-year constitutional office. You have 15 county employees and five... Eight prosecutors. Eight prosecutors. Including myself. County funded, state funded. Right. You have a state legislature and a governor that's responsible for providing state funds. You have a district attorney or a state attorney general that has some oversight responsibilities, some constitutional responsibilities. And then you report to a Sheboygan County Board Law Committee or a liaison committee. Correct. And that's the final piece here. What is your relationship then with the county board and the law committee? How does that work? Well, you know, I know quite a few of the county board members, but my direct relationship is with the law committee. That's our liaison committee between the county board and our office. And over the years, I've always had a good relationship with them. I think they understand what we do. They understand the problems we have. They're very supportive and assisting us in finding answers to things. The check diversion program originated in the law committee. We brought that to the law committee and discussed that. We were encouraged by them to go forward with that, which eventually became a county ordinance, which is bringing in revenue into the county, as well as returning a lot of money to merchants who have been the victim of bounce checks. So I have a good relationship, I think, certainly with the law committee. And then I have individual relationship, because I know people on the county board. I'm not really directly, except for finance, I suppose, to some degree, but the finance committee. But I don't really have that type of relationship with anyone else on the county board that I have with the law committee, which is our liaison committee, which in my opinion, a very good relationship. And that's a role that every department has where they have a specific liaison committee that they report to. We have nine. The law committee is not Joe's boss. Joe answers to the people as a constitutional officer, but the law committee has a lot of say in how the budget's developed, and how much resources that the district attorney's office may receive, ultimately, approved by the full county board. Nice overview. I'll turn it over to Mike. Thank you, Adam. As was mentioned before, Joe, the caseload that you're carrying is going up. Could you give us a little idea of the number of cases you're taking care of and some of the trends you've seen in the type of individuals that are coming through the system? Absolutely. Last year, we prosecuted about 6,400 cases. Roughly half of those, 3,200 were actual criminal cases. The rest were juvenile cases and the non-criminal things that we talked about about my duties with the sheriff's department and other agencies in Interpoint County. There are actually eight law enforcement agencies in Sheboygan County, including the DNR in Wisconsin State Patrol. We've seen an almost steady increase in the number of cases over the last several years. Last year, there was a slight decline, but it was really insignificant. We've seen an increase in the amount of resources we have to put into drug investigations. And that culminated last year with a roughly 18-month investigation, 18-month long investigation in which we used resources of the federal government of the state division of criminal investigation and our own people here in crippling, in my opinion, crippling a massive cocaine delivery ring that was out of Chicago into Sheboygan and other parts of to Appleton and to Green Bay. We've seen an increase in those type of cases. It's prompted by the fact that, and we're seeing people who don't live here come into the community to distribute this stuff. That's mostly cocaine or crack cocaine. And what we're seeing is that we have to get more and more sophisticated and use resources that we can supply on our own. For example, in this last case, we had two wiretaps in place. We've never done that before in Sheboygan County, at least to my knowledge. And because the wiretap statute is based on the federal statute of the Wisconsin wiretap statute, you have reams and reams of paperwork to do to legally get a wiretap order. The amount of documents needed to get these two wiretaps is about four inches thick. And that's because the federal requirements, because the states adopted that. In addition, we needed expertise to run these 24 hours a day. Wiretap is where someone's actually listening into a conversation. The call wiretaps is that we don't tap them anymore. It's all electronic now, so it's really just getting a computer or a number of computers with a feed-in from the phone companies because it's all digitized now. It's not actually clipping those two little allocated clips into a line and listening there. And there are restrictions with that. We need help with that. We need 24 hours a day. So we had help from not only agencies here in Sheboygan County, but from the state and from the feds as well. And financial support, unfortunately, for the feds. The wiretaps cost us about $10,000. That money was funded by the federal government by DEA, so we're very grateful for that. We're trying to help recover some of that for them, but we never would have had those kind of resources. And that's the kind of investigation we're seeing now. We're not just stopping at the county border. We're going beyond the county border to see how far back it goes. And it's ending up in Chicago. Ultimately, it goes down to Milwaukee. And that's a kind of thing that could not exist up here without, unfortunately, Sheboygan County residents participating in it, purchasing it, and actually helping to distribute it. So that's what we see a growth in. We had, in addition to the 100 or so search warrants that were issued last year, about 94 of them were drug related. We also issued 24 additional warrants that were specifically drug related. These were sophisticated electronic warrants, and I won't go into detail, but technology is changing. We have to keep up with the change. And then, of course, we had the two wire taps, two, which was just an incredible amount of work. And so what we're trying to do is to provide the people of Sheboygan County with, one, the knowledge of what's going on here. And, two, in using every available resource we can to try to break up these drug warnings, and you know as well as I do, as soon as we break up one, there's another one that'll take its place. It's an ongoing thing. And when I talk about marijuana, we're talking about cocaine and crack cocaine, which is extremely addictive. And so that's the trend I see right now. And it's a frustrating and concerning trend to see this type of drug activity, not only on occasion to end here in Sheboygan, but to come into Sheboygan where it uses the transit route to go out to other communities in the state of Wisconsin. I-43, we routinely refer to it as a drug highway because of all the drugs moving through this area on the interstate. So that's a big concern for us. I agree it's a disturbing trend, and I'm glad that you're adjusting your offices to meet that demand and take care of those crimes that are occurring. Recently in the last about two years, we've seen a municipal court grow in Sheboygan and Kohler. How has that affected the number of cases or the type of cases that you're seeing? Well, it really only affects the... Well, it does affect us. It does help us out. About 400 cases last year, and at least in the city Sheboygan and the Kohler, I believe they're together in the municipal court, of first-defense drunk drivings. They're about 400 cases. And we're not for the municipal courts. We'd have to prosecute those. So that's 400 cases that we didn't have to do because the municipal courts were doing it, and that's not even including some of the other municipal courts in the county, just Sheboygan and Kohler. So it does help us out. It not only helps the municipalities out because they get to keep a portion of the court costs for their own programs, but it helps us out because it lessens our workload. When the legislation was talking about making drunk driving a first-defense or criminal offense, the first thing I looked at were the numbers from municipal courts trying to figure out, okay, how would that affect us? And just in the Sheboygan municipal court alone, that's 400 more cases. That would be a 30% increase in our traffic crimes. That would be a devastating effect if it weren't for the fact that municipalities are handling me. So they're a great boon to us. They help with generating funds for the municipalities that they work out of. So it's all around. I think it's a pretty good deal. That's good to hear that it's a positive development for you in assisting you. As you know, Sheboygan seems to get a fair amount of, maybe bashing a little bit. And some people have cited that some of the press releases or emails that you send out to the local media bring some of this on. Obviously, you're reporting the facts, but could you explain a little bit about the process you go through in publicizing the court cases you have and why you're doing that? Sure. The process is this. Every people are arrested on a continual basis and they're placed in jail and they usually have their first appearance in front of a judge. In most cases, the court commissioner, who works for the judges, the very next day. Sometimes it's two days, but the very next day. In order for them to do that initial appearance, we have to have a criminal complaint ready. We have to file a criminal complaint, which is a written document, states them, the charge, that kind of stuff. Every day, once those are filed with the clicker courts and they public public record, I email them out to the local media. That includes the press, it includes HBL, it includes a Plymouth review, it includes a sounder. That's really the core group. And the reason I do that is twofold. One is if I don't, they call me every day and ask me what's going on, what's new, can you give us a copy of the thing? Secondly, and the most, the more important to me is I think people in this county deserve to know what's going on in this county as far as crime is concerned. And we used to have, and this is not a criticism, but the press used to have, and HBL too, used to have people assigned just to the courts. And they would report on all the stuff in the courts. That was their beat, the courts. We don't have that anymore. And so without that type of coverage, when I became DA, I thought it would one, help me by not getting these calls every single day about who's locked up and what they're dealing with. And it would help people in the county realize that I think they have the right to know what's going on and what kind of crimes are being committed, you know, what the number of crimes are being committed. And yeah, occasionally an outside Sherboygan news agency will get a hold of that and ask for a copy. It's a public record, I send it to them. Occasionally I'll make comments on camera if I think it's appropriate. But I think it's an educational process. I think one of the things we emphasized during this last trial, the homicide trial, to that jury and to the public in general, was that you're going to see some things here that you don't know exist in this county, that you have no idea what's going on. And because you live in this county, I think you should know about this. You should know about how drug dealing is done here. You should know about where it's coming from. You should know about crimes. You should know about people that sexually assault children, not just from the sexual registry, but when they're brought in, when the process begins. It's an informational type of thing with me. I think a forewarned public is a forearm public, that they, knowing that these types of things are possible, perhaps it'll aid them in some way in prevention. I still think Sherboygan County is one of the best places to live. We really don't have the type of crime problems that cities of our size are beginning to have. We certainly don't have the crime problems that larger cities have. We're not as Milwaukee as the homicide capital of the state of Wisconsin. But I think that's because people need to know what's going on, what kind of crimes are being charged in this county, and who's doing them. And that's just my opinion. I appreciate it and thanks for that explanation so we understand how your office functions in that area. You've been squeezed a lot on by the state now and they're trying to give you even more budget constraints to deal with. Could you give us a little idea how this is affecting your office and what you're planning on for the near future at least? Well, we have an immediate crisis and we have a long-term crisis. The long-term crisis is that the state has consistently underfunded prosecutors' offices around the state. In 1990, the state became responsible for the salaries and benefits of prosecutors. Prior to that, it was county by county. The reason the state did that was to provide a level of salary and benefits that would be the same across the state and to give persons who wanted to do a prosecutor's job an opportunity to perform in a career and to not just use it as a stepping off point to get a better job with a private attorney, a private defense attorney thing. And that meant regular raises and incentives and things of that nature. Almost from the get-go, the state did not comply with that. We're now at the point where the state's own independent bipartisan agency, Legislative Audit Bureau, developed a system of comparing the number of prosecutors to their caseloads for a decade now, since we did the beginning. And what they have shown is that statewide we're about 117 prosecutors shy and in Shepoint County we have five full-time prosecutors short of what we're supposed to have. The critical thing is that the state is now trying to institute the permanent layoff of prosecutors. If we were to lose one prosecutor, we're already five now, we lose one, we're going to be in a situation where we have to not prosecute some relatively minor misdemeanors. And as I indicated previously publicly, that's about 1,200 misdemeanors that we have to stop prosecuting if we lose a prosecutor. We have five courts that all do criminal stuff here. I have to sign one prosecutor to each court on a 100% basis. One person, the deputy DA does all the juvenile stuff. We have at least a half-time person to take care of the odds and ends and me to do the more complicated or more lengthy cases. That's it. And so, yeah, I hope that they don't come to that permanent layoff. It's not like everyone has to share this equally across the state. There are some jobs that you don't want to cut and I think prosecutors are one of them. I think people sometimes don't understand that if the police, you know, it's all well and good that police do an investigation and arrest someone. If we don't wish them to charge and prosecute them to court, that's the end of it. It's done. It doesn't matter what the police do. And so, we're an integral part of the police process. We're an integral part of the criminal justice system and the prosecuting of people. And I wish some state legislates would learn that and apparently, well, we're getting some publicity now, so apparently that word is heightening. Well, thanks for letting us know about those challenges you're facing with that. It's like a broken record. Anything with the state, whether it was promised or implemented 10, 20 years ago, it just seems like it's not being carried through. I'll tell you, Adam, it's worse than that. It's got to the point where, not to the point where this has been going on for a while. For example, there was, in the last, not this budget, but the previous budget, there was a utility fee increase on utility bills attacks that was supposed to go to prosecutors' things. And that was great. That passed. And then what happens? They switch it. It goes to the general fund, and they use it for anything they want. So they say, well, I voted in favor of prosecutors or I voted in favor of this, and they switch around. I don't know how many people know that. When we were first created as state employees in 1990, our funding came from the state lottery. From the state lottery. And all of a sudden, it was gone. It wasn't the state lottery anymore. It was somewhere else. So it's this bait and switch thing, this shell game that goes on all the time, where in the beginning, it looks like, oh, that's great. They're doing a great thing. And then when something else, they want to divert it somewhere else, they do it. And that's, you're right. That's the problem. And it's been around for a while. It's been around for decades. We have the same issue in our clerk of courts, which is obviously a support department in the judicial system. And the funding will be raised. And it doesn't keep it in our court system. And then property taxes go up. We only have a couple more minutes. But this is obviously a critical, critical area of concern, as you said, not only today, but in the future. This has got to get fixed. In the meantime, you have a state legislature that wants to, you know, keep people in jail longer and get tougher on crime. And all that sounds good when you're on the soapbox. And we certainly want to have effective law enforcement. But if we don't have effective prosecution, if we don't have the prosecutors in place, the job doesn't get done. These folks are put back out on the street or we just can't effectively complete the cycle. That's true. And unfortunately, you know where the blame's going to land on that? It's going to land on the individual DAs when I do their job. And it's kind of frustrating because we do the, you know, we're all working 50 to 60 hours a week. All the prosecutors were trying, we don't get paid overtime. We don't get a job. And there's just too many cases to do it. And the legislature keeps, in the last three sessions alone, they've either created or increased the penalties on 60 crimes. Now, one nickel to go to prosecutors' salaries to help ease to help ease the caseload by providing more prosecutors. The only exception was the drunk driving bill that recently passed in which the joint finance committee did grant $700,000 to have more prosecutors, but to offset a deficit that the DOA created itself by messing around with the budget. So you're right. I mean, I don't know where it's going to end. It can't go on like this. It just can't. Yeah, it continues to go on. And as you can see, the passion can start coming out right away when you start talking about rules and responsibilities of whether it's prosecution or anything at county government level where there's a reliance on state government. It has not been meeting its obligations and it's coming home. And I can't say enough about the fine work that Joe DeCecco has done as their district attorney. He works so hard. He's highly dedicated, extremely conscientious, and I'm glad that he's been willing to beat the drum a little bit and try to raise awareness to this problem. Unfortunately, it seems as though it is a broken record or groundhog day because it just continues and continues. And sadly, I hope it doesn't take a crisis to get it fixed. But I'm starting to think that might be the case. Joe, thanks for your time today and joining us and shedding a little light on the important work that you do. Well, thank you, the chairman, for having me. I appreciate it and I enjoyed it very much. And until next time, thank you for joining us. Don't ever hesitate to contact any of us at the county level if you have suggestions or concerns or want more questions answered on what you may have heard today. Next month, we're going to have someone from the UW Extension Office, and we'll either be Dave Such, our director, or one of his staff. So until then, thanks for joining us.