At a press conference on July 23, the day after one of his officers killed Corey Ruiz, a 38-year-old homeless Black man who apparently produced a knife during a struggle with officers, Madison Police Chief John Patterson declared: “I think everyone in this room can feel the thinness of trust in this city right now.”
He got that right.
Patterson, between interruptions by protesters, one of whom held a sign with the revolting message “Corrupt Cops Deserve to Die Too…Kill Peterson,” pledged his commitment to maximum transparency while Ruiz’s killing is investigated by the state Justice Department’s Division of Criminal Investigation. He even promised: “We’re not going to use an active investigation as a reason to not share” information.
But such assurances ring hollow, given that Patterson failed to provide basic information about the incident that he clearly either knows or could easily find out. Like the name of the officer who pumped three bullets into Ruiz’s head as he lay on the ground at the intersection of Williamson and Baldwin streets. Or whether Ruiz fell or was pulled off his bicycle after officers sought to question him in connection to alleged property transgressions. Or the severity of the knife wound purportedly sustained by the officer who did the shooting. Or the nature of the injury said to have been suffered by one of the three other officers at the scene, other than that it was not caused by a knife.
Patterson’s department has since cited the state’s active investigation as a reason for not discussing details of the case.
Meanwhile, Patterson has reiterated his department’s contention that the use of a taser to subdue Ruiz was “not successful.” But videos of Ruiz’s killing, taken by citizen bystanders, show that less than a second passed between when the taser was deployed and when the officer opened fire. UW-Madison law professor Ion Meyn, who studies the use of police force, told the Wisconsin State Journal that it looks like Ruiz was falling forward, which is “consistent with being tased.” He suggested the officer may have acted “in a state of adrenaline and tunnel vision.”
But even if the investigation finds that a less-lethal response was possible, the officer who killed Ruiz is unlikely to face criminal charges or disciplinary action. And that may be because he was doing what he was trained to do.
Police officers throughout the nation are taught to regard the presence of a knife as a potentially lethal threat that may justify the use of lethal force. In many cases, this training is based on adherence to the contested “21-foot rule,” which holds that a violent attacker can cover a distance of 21 feet in roughly 1.5 seconds, meaning that any hesitation in responding to the presence of a knife can cost officers their lives.
“They are taught that a person armed with an edged weapon and within a 21-foot distance can kill them before they can discharge their firearm,” wrote former Madison Police Chief David Couper, whom Patterson has cited as a guiding light, in a 2015 article for The Progressive. “And police, when confronted with situations they believe merit the use of deadly force, are taught to shoot and keep shooting multiple times at a person’s ‘center mass’ — the chest and heart.”
Indeed, if the officer who killed Ruiz is determined to have done anything wrong, it may be that he aimed for the head and not the torso, which is more reliably fatal, consistent with his training.
The result of such policies is that a lot of people in this country are killed by police — at least 1,201 last year, according to policeviolencereport.org. Of these, 254 were said to be armed with a knife or sharp object; an additional 98 were unarmed. The officers involved in these killings are almost never charged with crimes.
In comparison, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund reported that police deaths in the line of duty in 2025 hit an 80-year low at 111, including 44 “firearms-related fatalities.”
Since 1992, police in Madison have fatally shot at least a dozen people. They include Tony Robinson, a 19-year-old unarmed Black man who was gunned down in 2015, a block away from where Ruiz was killed. The officer who killed Robinson, Matt Kenny, had eight years earlier shot and killed another man, Ronald Brandon, for waving a pellet gun while drunk. After Robinson’s killing, Kenny was reassigned — to train other cops.
Couper, in a 2016 blog post, had this to say: “Our police today are more educated than they have ever been. Within their ranks are creative and innovative officers who have the ability to design and train on the use of less-than-deadly methods of using force. Let’s call upon this capacity and design new, less-than-deadly responses to these critical incidents.” It’s not clear what if any progress has been made toward this end; to judge by Ruiz’s killing, not enough.
Patterson, at the press conference, also pledged not to wait for the state to conclude its investigation “to begin the work of examining our policies, our training and response. We’re going to do that now.”
Let’s hope — and work to make sure — that happens. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before the next tragic and unnecessary police killing.
Bill Lueders, formerly the news editor of Isthmus, is a writer in Madison.
