It all felt familiar, painfully so.
Late Thursday afternoon, news began to spread on social media that a Black man had been gunned down by police officers at a street corner in Madison, Wis. Over the next couple of hours, we learned that the shooting victim had died, and that a neighborhood bystander had captured much of the encounter, including the three fatal gunshots, on video.
The video shows the man — chased by Madison police officers after a report of someone checking door handles on parked cars — had fallen off his bicycle and was on the ground when four officers surrounded him. There is a struggle. Analysts say the suspect appeared to have a knife, and police would later say an officer was injured. The man is Tasered before one officer fires the deadly shots into the suspect while he’s lying on his side.
The dead man was identified as 38-year-old Corey Ruiz, and as the video of his killing spread, experts on policing raised serious questions. “What’s particularly egregious to me is that this person seems to have been going into compliance at the time he was shot in the head,” Ion Meyn, an associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the Capital Times.
The Ruiz case adds one more name to the ever-growing list of victims of American police violence, preceded by the likes of Eric Garner, killed in a New York Police Department choke hold after selling loose cigarettes; Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old killed with a toy gun on a Cleveland playground; and George Floyd, whose 2020 police murder in Minneapolis sparked the largest mass protests in U.S. history.
Yet, the brutal shooting of Ruiz also felt very different in one important way. Although the public outrage was real — hundreds have marched through the streets of the Wisconsin state capital each night since the incident, chanting for justice — it also felt quarantined, a virus of anger contained largely to Madison before it could spread nationally like the Black Lives Matter marches of six years ago.
On social media last week, while many posts did express dismay and anger over the actions of the Madison cops, the prevailing vibe was warning people to turn off autoplay functions, that they might want to avoid the gory footage of the man’s death. “Huge warning,“ one Bluesky poster wrote, echoing many others. ”The Madison police shooting is horrific. Careful watching news with kids around.”
No one shut down the expressways in New York City or Chicago, as we saw in the contentious era from 2014 to 2020 after the killings of Floyd, Ferguson, Mo.’s Mike Brown, and too many others. There was a nationwide day of marches and vigils on Saturday against violence by law enforcement, but it was all about recent killings by the immigration cops of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These tragedies have seized the political attention that once focused on rank-and-file police.
How else to explain the similarly muted reaction to June’s police killing of a 1-year-old baby, Kohen Wiley, in Senatobia, Miss., who was inside a car with his mother; employees of a Walmart store had accused her of shoplifting diapers. An independent autopsy suggested the infant was shot from the side of the vehicle, raising questions about the official police version of events. Yet, Kohen — innocent victim of police violence — has also not become a household name like Floyd, Brown, or Rice.
Sure, part of the problem is that in the second year of Donald Trump’s second presidency, we have become as overloaded as the Texas power grid in an ice storm. I woke up this Sunday morning with potential columns about killer heat waves from Des Moines, Iowa, to Bordeaux, France, the idiocy of Trump’s Iran war and the administration’s efforts to pretend four U.S. deaths didn’t happen, the utter embarrassment of Trump’s speech to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and the assembled journalists who enabled it, or the Trump family’s latest, planet-threatening get-rich-quick scheme.
But I elected to write about this because it is alarming how numb the U.S. body politic has become to violence, especially the kind perpetrated by our warrior cops, in the years since the last echoes of the Floyd protests faded out.
It’s not just that very little came about despite the massive nature of the protests — a few good municipal ideas here and there, a handful of state laws, but nothing along the lines of radical police reform that millions clamored for in 2020. It’s that police violence has actually gotten worse in the years since Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin held his knee on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds.
The statistics tell the story. So far in 2026, with the year barely half over, police have already killed 703 people, on pace with the worst years on record, according to the tracking site Mapping Police Violence. It has only recorded seven days this year when there was not a police-involved fatality. What’s more, victims are 2.8 times more likely to be Black, like Ruiz and Kohen, than white.
Here’s the part that demands our attention: This sustained level of police violence — on a scale that is simply unfathomable in other developed nations around the world — is happening despite the fact that murder rates and other crime stats are plummeting.
“In the decade [prior] to 2024, the number of Americans killed by police jumped by about a third,” wrote the U.K.’s Economist, covering a topic the American news media has largely ignored. “Police killings dipped last year but this year have risen again. Perversely, the rise comes as national murder rates are falling. A growing share of Americans who are killed — one in ten — are dying at the hands of police.”
The problem isn’t crime. It’s the zeitgeist. While bloodshed has always been a problem in a nation with a Wild West mentality, awash with guns, violence from an Iranian girls’ school to fishing boats in the Caribbean to the icy streets of Minneapolis has become utterly pervasive. The omnipresence of state-sanctioned murder is arguably why so many elected not to even watch the Ruiz video.
And rather than tackle police violence as a social problem, Trump and his regime have encouraged it — in word (“Please don’t be too nice,” the president famously told a cop convention in 2017) and in deed, such as ending consent agreements with big-city police departments known for unwarranted brutality.
Meanwhile, those George Floyd marchers in 2020 arguably spiked the football way too soon — thinking they’d made their point when, within weeks, cowardly politicians in both parties would start running away from any notion of police reforms. Much of the worst police violence takes place in overwhelmingly Democratic cities run by ostensibly progressive mayors — places like Madison, a university town and a hotbed of left-wing activism and protest since the 1960s.
The shooting of Ruiz was the third contentious police killing in the same Madison neighborhood since 2012, when 30-year-old Paul Heenan, who was white, was fatally shot by an officer who claimed Heenan was trying to grab his gun. In 2015, a Madison cop shot and killed an unarmed 19-year-old biracial man, Tony Robinson. No officers were charged, even as the city paid out some $5.65 million to settle lawsuits.
So much about the Madison police echoes the broader problems of American policing. Federal data show nearly half of the department’s use-of-force incidents were against African Americans, even though the city’s population is just 7% Black. And despite Madison’s reputation for liberalism, major police reforms have been slow in coming.
None of the officers who apprehended Ruiz were wearing a body camera. Both activists and many public officials have been urging body cams for Madison officers since Robinson’s 2015 killing, yet the city has never come up with the money to fund them. Such footage would have provided the cops’ view of why they felt it necessary to shoot Ruiz in the scuffle.
Experts say Ruiz’s possession of the knife and the allegation that it was used to wound an officer all but guarantee no one will be criminally charged, noting the grounds of self-defense. No one is denying that police have a right to defend themselves — and that they often face tough decisions in the heat of the moment.
But that shouldn’t obscure the bigger debates over whether police have the training to prevent these encounters from needlessly reaching that point. The two most controversial police killings of 2026 began with allegations of shoplifting diapers and fiddling with locked car doors — not exactly capital offenses.
“He was a lyricist,” Marjorie Aliomar — Ruiz’s partner and mother of his 13-year-old daughter — told a tear-laden news conference this weekend. “He was a poet. He was an artist. He was very kind, and he was extremely funny.”
Yet, his story is already fading from our headlines. It doesn’t have to be this way. Ruiz’s killing could have been our wake-up call to fight for all the causes — the end of qualified immunity for officers, universal use of body cams, the death of occupation-style warrior cop policing, and the return of a U.S. Department of Justice that again treats brutality as a crime — that have been tossed down the memory hole since 2020.
If you can emotionally handle it, don’t avoid the Ruiz video — or the problem. Many of you reading this column marched for Floyd. Now’s a good time to look in the mirror and ask yourself: What have I done lately to oppose the violence of an American police state? In other words, have I become comfortably numb?
