Corey Ruiz is dead. The four Madison police officers who killed him have not been named — all are on leave, at least one was injured, and the department’s Chief John Patterson cannot say what happened because nobody in a Madison police uniform was wearing a body camera. The department does not require them. There is no official footage of the moment a man’s life ended at the hands of the state.
Let me be precise about what this means.
When a bystander’s cellphone captured the shooting of George Floyd in 2020, the footage was grainy, shot from across the street, and still it moved the country. That footage existed only because a bystander had the presence of mind to record what the officers on scene were paid by the state not to record. Floyd’s case was not the first time a bystander caught what a body camera could have caught. It was the first time the combination of a recording and a willing public forced the state’s hand.
Madison has chosen to make that combination impossible to repeat. Every police chief in America who fields a patrol unit without body cameras has made the same calculation: the risk of being caught in a lie by official footage is worse than the risk of being caught in a lie by a bystander’s cellphone. A bystander’s phone can be dismissed — poor lighting, bad angle, the phone was already out, the person recording was biased. Department-issued footage, date-stamped, chain-of-custody logged, from the officer’s own chest, is not dismissible. And a department that knows it cannot be held to its own record is a department that has decided not to be held accountable at all.
The body camera debate is almost old enough to vote. Departments that do not equip their officers have had nearly two decades of structural failure to learn from. Every time a chief says “we’re working on it,” every time a city council defers the budget line item to the next cycle, the message is the same: we accept the risk of another contested shooting, another investigation without footage, another community that will never know what its police actually did. The camera is not expensive. The liability exposure of not having it is orders of magnitude larger. The refusal to equip is not a financial calculation. It is a political one.
The Wisconsin state legislature has not passed a mandatory-body-camera bill. The Madison city council has not put its foot down. The police union has not demanded the equipment that would protect its members from the worst accusation — that they shot a man and then told the public to take their word for it. Every institution that could have required the cameras has chosen not to. Every single one.
The guardians of the state’s monopoly on force asked to be believed. And then they handcuffed the only way to test whether what they say is true.
I cannot tell you what happened in the Marquette neighborhood on July 22. I cannot tell you whether Corey Ruiz pulled a knife, whether the officer who shot him had a choice, whether the four officers who restrained him followed the procedures their own department claims to train for. I cannot tell you because the department decided, by action and inaction, that you would never have a way to know.
The department says Ruiz pulled a knife. They say an officer was injured. They say that officer fired. They say all four are on leave. But the only way to test any of these claims — the only way to know whether the account is true — would be a recording from the officer’s body. That recording does not exist because the department chose not to create it.
They are asking you to trust them. They have decided that the evidence would not exist. That is a choice, not an oversight.
This is where the wrathful-compassion register finds its target: not in the individual officers — though one of them fired the shots — but in the apparatus that placed them in the field without the one tool that would have made any of this knowable. The officer who killed Corey Ruiz is a person. That officer’s family will live with what happened. The chief is a person making calculations in a budget meeting. But the decision not to equip is not a person. It is a structure of avoidance that runs from City Hall to the statehouse to every police union contract that deletes the camera requirement. That structure was built by named people, vote by vote, year by year, for decades, and it produced a predictable outcome in the Marquette neighborhood on July 22.
A Madison city council member who voted against the body camera budget made a decision. That decision was not about money. It was about what kind of death the city was willing to accept to save a line item.
Patterson said it is possible dashcam footage of the incident exists. Possible. He was unable to confirm. The man who runs the department cannot tell you whether a car-mounted camera, pointed at a street where one of his officers fired on a civilian, has anything on its memory card. That is not a statement about a bureaucratic delay. It is a statement about priorities. If the department’s leadership had made body cameras a priority years ago, there would be no uncertainty. If the state had mandated them, there would be no uncertainty. If the federal grants that fund local police departments had attached a condition — get the cameras or lose the money — there would be no uncertainty.
The Madison Police Department has declined to equip its frontline officers for years. By that choice, the department has ensured that every fatal use of force will be a question mark. The same structural gap that left Madison without footage has left half of ICE’s field offices without cameras after a string of fatal shootings, despite an acting director who publicly promised the equipment after a Houston killing. The pattern is not incompetence. The pattern is the structure.
The cellphone footage captured at least three gunshots. Three. A bystander’s phone will be the evidentiary record — not because it is better, but because the department ensured no better record exists. The state asked the public to trust its account of a violent death. And then it guaranteed that the public would never have the evidence to verify a single word.
The Beloved Community King spoke of cannot arrive through a civic structure that tells the harmed to take its word for what happened to them. Trust is not owed. Trust is built, decision by decision, year by year. A department that deletes the possibility of verification has decided not to build trust. It has decided that the public’s right to know what happened to Corey Ruiz is less important than the department’s freedom to say whatever it wants about what happened to Corey Ruiz.
I will hold that decision to the light. It will not stand as the quiet policy of a mid-sized Midwestern department; it will stand as the indictment of every elected official, every budget chair, every union negotiator, every chief who walked past the line item and decided the camera could wait another year. The camera could wait. Corey Ruiz could not. The next person shot by an unequipped officer will not be able to wait either.
The arc does not bend toward justice because we wait for it. The arc bends because specific people, in a specific moment, push. Those council members, legislators, and chiefs who chose not to push will carry the weight of what happened in the Marquette neighborhood on the night of July 22. They will carry it because the department’s own records are silent, and silence in a case like this is not neutrality. Silence is a choice about whose story gets to be the only one.
There were at least three gunshots. Nobody’s department-issued camera recorded them. That was a choice. Named people made it. And the people they serve will remember that they made it.