Corey Ruiz, the Law, and a Question I Owe a Friend: “Why Are They Getting Away With It?”
Hon. Rev. Everett D. Mitchell
By the Hon. Rev. Everett D. Mitchell
“Why are cops killing Black people and getting away with it? What does the law have to say about it?”
Michael Johnson, a beloved advocate and leader who recently passed away, asked me that question after Tony Robinson was killed in 2015, a question hundreds of community members were asking at the time. It sent me deeper into the law and the cases on police use of force, into teaching a course on Race, Racism and the Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and into co-chairing a United Way of Dane County task force that examined use of force standards and compiled recommendations for the county to adopt. Every case has its own specific facts, but watching a video like the one of Corey Ruiz, the idea of justice can feel fleeting. Honestly, this question continues to evade a concrete answer. Yet the name Corey Ruiz, now added to the list of those we have lost, requires a new attempt at one.
What Happened on Williamson Street
On July 22, Madison police responded to a call about a man checking parked cars in the Marquette neighborhood on the near east side. Officers located Corey Ruiz, who rode off on a bicycle through backyards before encountering him again near South Baldwin and Williamson Streets. He fell or was pulled from the bike, and a struggle followed. A Taser did not work. Police say Ruiz pulled a fixed blade knife and injured an officer, and video reviewed by ABC News and the Wisconsin State Journal appears to show a knife in his hand. Within seconds of a warning shouted about the knife, another officer shot Ruiz three times at close range, including once in the head, as he was on the ground.
Ruiz was thirty-eight, with a record that included a 2021 felony conviction for resisting arrest in a manner that injured an officer. That history matters to how this case will be litigated, but it does not answer Michael’s question. It only sharpens it.
Madison police are not required to wear body cameras, and budget proposals to fund them have failed at city council more than once. A central part of my and other’s ongoing recommendation included the use of police body cameras and worked with former police chief Shon Barnes to assist in realizing the importance of that information for accountability and litigation. I learned from Tony’s case, that dash cameras are not enough information. The public record of Ruiz’s final seconds exists only because a bystander was recording. Four officers remain on leave while the Wisconsin DOJ’s Division of Criminal Investigation conducts its standard independent review.
The Legal Standard: Graham v. Connor
Here is where the law enters, and where Michael’s question gets its hardest answer. In 1989, the United States Supreme Court decided Graham v. Connor, the controlling standard for evaluating whether an officer’s use of force violates the Fourth Amendment. Force must be judged by objective reasonableness: would a reasonable officer, on the scene, facing the same circumstances, have believed the force used was necessary. Three factors guide that judgment: the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to safety, and whether the suspect is resisting or attempting to flee. Reasonableness is judged from the officer’s perspective in the moment, not with hindsight, and it allows for the fact that officers often make split second decisions. That instruction is the hinge on which most of these cases turn. It is not whether a better outcome was possible, but whether a reasonable officer could have believed, in that instant, that deadly force was necessary.
That standard is why an alleged knife in Ruiz’s hand and a report of an injured officer will likely satisfy the immediate threat factor, even though he had already been tased and was on the ground. Experts reviewing the same video have not agreed: one use of force expert called the shooting preventable, another said the resistance and the knife justified deadly force, and a University of Wisconsin law professor, Ion Meyn, went further, saying Ruiz appeared to be moving into compliance when he was shot in the head. All three can be right about how the law reads and still leave a family without an answer for why their son is dead and a community grappling with what to do next. That gap, between what the law permits and what a community can live with, is the truest answer to Michael’s question. Officers are not merely getting away with it in some lawless sense; they are often operating squarely within a standard the Supreme Court wrote to protect split second judgment, even when that judgment ends a life that did not have to end.
A Block With a History
Corey Ruiz did not die in an unfamiliar place. He was killed a block and a half from where Tony Robinson, an unarmed nineteen-year-old, was shot and killed by a Madison officer in 2015, and near the site where Paul Heenan was shot and killed by an officer in 2012, three deaths on the same stretch across thirteen years. I marched for Tony Robinson, chanting his name, believing that grief made visible would be enough to bend something. The officer who shot him was not charged, a decision consistent with the Graham standard above. I did not expect, ten years later, to be writing about a third name from the same corner.
By the Numbers
Corey Ruiz is one name inside a pattern the data has tracked for over a decade. The Washington Post has documented fatal police shootings nationwide since 2015, when officers killed 994 people, a figure that has stayed near or above 1,000 nearly every year since, reaching 1,202 in 2025. Black Americans, twelve percent of the population, accounted for twenty four percent.
Wisconsin is not exempt, even though the state has historically ranked below the national rate. Mapping Police Violence, tracking these deaths since 2013, recorded at least nineteen fatal police encounters here last year, nearing the modern state record of twenty-six set in 2017. Black residents are roughly six percent of Wisconsin’s population but about a quarter of those killed by police since 2013, and Police Scorecard found a Black person nearly six times as likely as a white person to be killed. Ruiz’s death happened inside a decade long trend line that neither Madison nor Wisconsin has bent.
What Communities Can Build On
Michael’s question deserves more than a legal explanation; it deserves a direction. Fund and mandate body cameras, since the only public record of Ruiz’s final seconds exists because a stranger happened to be filming. Invest in the independent monitor’s office with full staffing, full record access, and standing to compel answers. Push the legislature to raise the use of force standard above the floor Graham v. Connor sets, a constitutional minimum, not a ceiling. Expand co-responder and crisis intervention models so low level calls do not default to an armed confrontation. And stay in the room after the vigils end: the work that changes outcomes happens in council chambers and legislative committee rooms, long after the candles at Baldwin and Williamson have burned down.
Michael, I do not have a clean answer for you. The law explains, with more precision than comfort, how officers can end a life and still be found to have acted lawfully. What the law does not decide is what we do next. That part is still ours.