Campaign press release · August 5, 2026

Sheriff Barrett Said Activists Attacked Dane County's 911 System. The County's Records Say Otherwise.

The Sheriff's Office accused activists of trying to overwhelm the county's 911 center on April 18. Two months later, on a podcast, Sheriff Barrett went further, describing an organized effort that left the office unable to send help. The county's 911 center was never overwhelmed, its own records show, and the office has never produced a document supporting the claim or corrected it.

MADISON, Wis. - On April 18, 2026, the Dane County Sheriff's Office published a press release about that morning's protest at Ridglan Farms. In the same document that defended the office's use of tear gas, 40mm less-lethal munitions and pepper balls, it said activists "attempted to divert resources by overwhelming Dane County's 911 center and inundating the Sheriff's Office with phone calls." The office posted the same sentence to its Facebook page, where it drew roughly two thousand reactions and hundreds of shares, with commenting limited. (archived copy, in case it comes down.)

The county's own call records, obtained through public records requests and published in full with this release, show the 911 center was never overwhelmed. The county produced 215 straight days of 911 call data. Measured against that year, April 18 was an ordinary day on the emergency line: 92 days were busier, 89 days were slower, and 129 days had more callers waiting over 40 seconds. And Dane County Public Safety Communications, which runs the 911 center, confirmed in writing that it holds no after-action report, incident log, or internal correspondence describing any telephone system problem on April 18.

The claim traveled on the Sheriff's word. Channel3000, Fox47 and FOX6 Milwaukee quoted the office's statement within days. Fox News, its Georgia syndication partner WRGA, the New York Post through AOL, and Animals 24-7 carried versions of it. Newsrooms ran it because a sheriff's office said it, which is why a false statement from that office does real damage.

Two months later, on a podcast recorded June 16 and published June 18, Barrett went further than his office's written statement. Activists, he said, had "one group... designed or signed up to call in to our 911 dispatch and overwhelm it so that we weren't able to send backup and additional resources to help." Asked whether public safety had been put at risk, he answered: "Absolutely... what if they needed help for 911 and they weren't able to get through because of these intentional acts to cause disruption and chaos." He agreed on the same episode that intentionally jamming 911 would be breaking the law. The next day, Outdoor News printed "jamming 911 lines" as flat fact, in its own voice, with no attribution. Three months on, no one has been charged with anything of the kind.

The Sheriff's Office has never produced a document supporting any of it.

The proof

Dane County Public Safety Communications released its 911 and non-emergency call statistics for 215 consecutive days, January 1 through August 3, 2026. That is 5,159 hours of call data. Every figure below is computed from that production, which is published unaltered along with the spreadsheets built from it. Anyone can check the arithmetic.

Against its own year, April 18 was an ordinary day on the 911 line. Not a good day or a bad day. An ordinary one.

Every 911 measure lands near the middle. April 18 had fewer calls waiting more than 40 seconds than 129 other days did. The longest any caller waited was 1 minute 33 seconds, and on April 11, a week before the protest, one caller waited 4 minutes and 21 seconds. Narrow it to Saturdays alone and nothing changes: of the 31 Saturdays in the period, 13 were busier, 8 were slower, and 15 had more calls over 40 seconds.

The single row that is off the chart is the last one, and it is not the 911 line.

Two 911 figures on April 18 did run above normal, and this campaign is publishing them rather than leaving them to be found. Call volume rose during the protest hours. From 9:00 to 11:59 AM the center took 96 emergency calls against a typical 72, and the average wait in the 9 and 10 AM hours rose from about 6 seconds to 17. Abandoned calls were also higher, 36 against a typical 30. An abandoned call is one where the caller hangs up before a call-taker picks up.

A 17-second average is roughly three rings. Across the whole period the typical hour ran 6 seconds, and 165 hours were slower than April 18's slowest. April 18's two elevated hours rank 173rd and 174th out of 5,159, sitting inside a cluster of 27 hours spread across the year that all averaged exactly 17 seconds. One of them is a Saturday 10 AM hour in June with 40 calls, all but identical to April 18's. Here is the top of that list, and where April 18 actually falls on it.

The data also shows what a 911 center under real strain looks like, because Dane County had such a day. On June 10 severe storms crossed the county and the 2 PM hour alone took 282 calls at an 8 minute 44 second average wait, with three callers in ten hanging up before anyone could answer. That is a system under load. So is April 25, the Saturday one week after the protest and the busiest Saturday on Dane County's 911 line all year, when every measure ran worse than April 18 and no one described it as an attack on anything.

Sheriff Barrett went on the podcast to describe April 18 as an organized effort to overwhelm 911 six days after June 10, the day his county's emergency line genuinely was overwhelmed. He did not mention that one.

And there is no record of any phone problem. The records request also sought any after-action report, incident log, or internal correspondence describing telephone system performance, call flooding, or unusual call volume on April 18. Public Safety Communications confirmed in writing that no such records exist. A 911 center that had been attacked, flooded or jammed would have generated paperwork.

What did happen

There was a genuine flood that morning, on a different phone line. The county's non-emergency and administrative lines took 507 calls between 9:00 and 11:59 AM, against 113 on a typical day and 86 on a typical Saturday. It is the busiest morning on those lines in the entire seven months of records, and the second busiest is not close.

The Sheriff's Office publishes that number, (608) 266-4948, on its own contact page as its non-emergency contact number. A national story about the Ridglan beagles was breaking that weekend. The records do not identify who was calling, and this campaign is not going to guess. What they do show is that the county answered, in under a minute on average at the worst point of the morning.

What the office said, and what it can defend

The Sheriff's Office wrote that activists "attempted to divert resources by overwhelming Dane County's 911 center and inundating the Sheriff's Office with phone calls." One fact in that sentence checks out: the county's non-emergency line did take an extraordinary volume of calls that morning.

Nothing else in it does. Call records show volume. They do not show who called, or why. The county's data identifies no caller, and the Sheriff's Office has never produced anything that does. The office did not simply report a busy phone line. It named a group, assigned that group a purpose, and pointed at the emergency line. Those are three claims beyond the one fact, and it has never substantiated any of them.

The 911 half is the false half, and it is the half that matters. A busy business line is an inconvenience. A jammed 911 line is a danger to everyone in the county, which is precisely why the accusation carried the weight it did and why it traveled. When the Sheriff spoke in June, he dropped the hedge entirely: not an attempt, but an organized effort that left his office unable to send help. Nothing in the county's records supports that, and his office has never substantiated it.

A sheriff knows the difference

The Sheriff's Office does not answer 911 calls. Dane County Public Safety Communications does. It is a separate county department, with its own director, and it handles 911 for the Sheriff's entire jurisdiction, including the town of Blue Mounds, where Ridglan Farms is located. So the Sheriff's Office speculated in public about another department's call center, without the data.

"A sheriff knows the difference between the 911 line and the non-emergency line. It is the most basic distinction in emergency services," said Jack Ordman, Democratic candidate for Dane County Sheriff. "If he didn't know, that is a competence problem in the most senior law enforcement job in the county. If he did know, then it is a question of integrity and due diligence. His office has offered no explanation at all."

Accusing people of deliberately attacking a 911 system is not a small thing. It is an accusation that they tried to cut the line between a stranger having a heart attack and the ambulance coming for them, made by the county's chief law enforcement officer, against people who have not been charged with it, and unsupported by the county's own records.

Ordman was at Ridglan Farms on April 18 and was tear-gassed there, which is what prompted him to request the records. "I was in that field, so I had every reason to want the record to say something," he said. "That is exactly why I went to the county for the numbers instead of trusting my own memory of the morning. Anyone can check them. That is the difference."

Two county departments handled the same subject very differently. Public Safety Communications answered a records request in under two weeks, then answered a follow-up question in writing. The Sheriff's Office denied all six records requests this campaign filed about April 18, in a single blanket rationale, and has not responded to correspondence since, including an offer to accept every name redacted from every document.

"It took one records request and one spreadsheet to check this," Ordman said. "So the question every voter should ask is what else in that press release would survive the same check."

The standard the Sheriff set for his deputies

Sheriff Barrett once fired a deputy for making a false report, finding six violations of the Sheriff's Office Code of Conduct, including truthfulness. Dane County released the discipline records, and Madison newsrooms reported them. WMTV quoted the Sheriff's termination letter:

"Your failure to uphold the standards of a sworn member of the DCSO undermines the integrity and reputation of law enforcement and damages the reputation of, and the public's trust in, the Dane Co. Sheriff's Office."

Reported by WMTV and Channel3000 on March 29, 2022, from records the county released publicly. The former deputy is a private citizen and is not named here.

"That is the standard, in the Sheriff's own words, and I agree with every word of it," Ordman said. "The question is what happens when the person who fails that standard is the one in charge of the office."

Under Wisconsin law, very little. County work rules define "employee" to exclude elected officials. The state exempts sheriffs from the training and recertification requirements it imposes on other officers as a condition of holding the job, and the statute that decertifies officers contains no ground for untruthfulness. No public document establishes that the Sheriff's Office Code of Conduct reaches the Sheriff himself, because the office has never published it. Removal requires the governor, or voters.

A standard of conduct that applies to everyone except the person at the top is not a standard at all. It tells every deputy that rules are enforceable downward and optional upward, and it leaves the public with no remedy when the office gets something badly wrong and declines to fix it. The person at the top should be held to the highest standard, not insulated from it.

No deputy wrote that press release. The people who take the calls and work the shifts are the ones whose credibility gets spent when command says something the records do not support.

The demand

A false accusation does not sit still. This one was carried by newsrooms across the country, posted to the Sheriff's Office Facebook page where it drew roughly two thousand reactions with commenting limited, printed as flat fact by an outdoors publication two months later, and pushed again this summer by a Madison talk radio host on his Facebook page, who cited the Sheriff as his source. The original is still posted on the Sheriff's Office website today, word for word. It has never carried a correction.

The people it described have lived under it the whole time. They were accused by the county's chief law enforcement officer of deliberately jamming the emergency line, something he agreed on that podcast would be against the law, and not one of them has been charged with it, because there is nothing to charge. An accusation that travels that far cannot be answered by the people it names. Only the office that issued it can take it back.

What Sheriff Barrett believed on April 18 is not something this campaign can know, and it will not pretend otherwise. What is documented is what has happened since. The county's data sat one records request away the entire time, and nobody in the Sheriff's Office went and got it. He has let the accusation stand.

So the Sheriff's Office should produce the records that substantiate an organized effort to overwhelm the emergency line, or retract the claim. It has done neither.

Jack Ordman is calling for:

1. A spoken public statement from Sheriff Barrett himself. He made the claim in his own voice on a podcast. He should correct it the same way, answering questions.
2. A written correction from the Sheriff's Office, issued where the original claim was: its website and its Facebook page.
3. An independent review of the office's and the Sheriff's public statements about April 18, commissioned by the Dane County Board of Supervisors. On April 20, Supervisors Michele Ritt and Rick Rose called for an independent investigation into the use of force. This is a separate question: what the office and the Sheriff told the public afterward, and what evidence they had for it. A review commissioned by the Board would not be met with the blanket denials a private records requester has been, and it should determine whether any further referral is warranted.

Two other statements about that day were never substantiated and never corrected: the Sheriff's on-camera account on April 21 of activists jumping on deputies' backs, taking their batons and striking them, and his office's day-of claim that the crowd was handled "without anyone being seriously injured." Those remain open questions. The 911 claim is not an open question, because the county answered it.

"This is what the ballot is for," Ordman said. "The Democratic primary is August 11. If you believe the Sheriff should meet the standard he sets for his deputies, that is the day to say so, and I am asking for your vote."

Documentation

Any newsroom can obtain the same data with the same request to Dane County Public Safety Communications, which fulfilled both of these in under two weeks. Everything this release claims is computed from the two files below, published exactly as the county produced them.

Download the full 911 call data, 215 days (Excel) Dane County Public Safety Communications: hourly 911 and non-emergency call counts, average caller ring times, daily abandoned calls and ring-time distributions for every day from January 1 through August 3, 2026. Released under Wis. Stat. §§ 19.31-19.39. A day-by-day summary is also available as CSV, derived from the same workbook.

Download the earlier five-Saturday production (PDF) The county's first production, July 22, 2026, covering April 18 and the four Saturdays before it. It is the source of the maximum answer times cited above. Note that its ring-time distribution buckets a different field than the workbook, measuring only the final leg of a call rather than the caller's full wait, so its distribution figures run shorter. This release uses the workbook's caller-wait figures throughout, which are the more conservative of the two.

• Dane County Sheriff's Office press release, April 18, 2026: live · archived copy
• The same release on the Sheriff's Office Facebook page, with commenting limited
• Sheriff Barrett on Sly's Podcast, "Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett - Ridglan Farms Beagles," recorded June 16, published June 18, 2026: slypodcasts.podbean.com
• Outdoor News, "Wisconsin's Ridglan Farms beagle facility decides to shut down Blue Mounds operation," June 19, 2026: outdoornews.com
• Dane County Public Safety Communications overview to the county's Public Protection and Judiciary Committee, May 26, 2026, establishing which agency answers 911 in Dane County: Dane County Legistar
• Sheriff Barrett's April 21 on-camera claims: WMTV
• Coverage of the deputy termination quoted above: WMTV, March 2022

Media contact: info@ordman.org · (608) 708-5225
Paid for by Ordman for Sheriff.