Say His Name: Demand Justice for Corey Ruiz
Say his name:
Corey Ruiz.
Say his name:
Corey Ruiz.
Say his name:
Corey Ruiz!
Corey Ruiz was a 38-year-old Black man murdered by police in Madison, Wisconsin, on Williamson Street, just about a mile and a half from my house just last week.
One could argue that it was an execution. Many are calling it exactly that.
And another police killing on Williamson Street where police murdered two previous people including Tony Robinson, a young Black man who had taken mushrooms and was freaking out.
Supposedly, police were investigating a call of someone trying to open car doors, which actually is not a crime. If one were to come across on unlocked car and then enter it, that would be a crime, but trying car door handles isn’t.
Corey tried to flee. He hopped on a bike he found and tried to escape. The cops chased him. Corey drove off a curb in front of the Crystal Corner Bar, a longtime Willy Street landmark. He crashed.
And then they were upon him.
Four cops were upon him. The situation escalated quickly. In about a minute or two, Corey was dead, with three bullets in the head.
Supposedly, Corey had a knife and wounded one of the officers. We don’t know how large a knife it was or to what extent the cop was wounded. What we do know for sure is that it wasn’t Corey who escalated the situation. And what we know for sure is that Corey is dead.
I’ve seen the video of the last handful of seconds before Corey was shot. He’s on the ground. They pull him to his feet. At some point, a Taser is deployed. They claim it didn’t work. Three cops knock him to the ground. One kicks him two or three times. The other draws his weapon, puts his foot on Corey and fires three shots into Corey’s head.
Also in the video, one can see a fourth officer, a woman, backing away with her hand covering her mouth, seeming to recoil in horror at what she had seen.
The shooter will claim self-defense because Corey had a knife. I want to be clear that once they had him on the ground, Corey was prone and defenseless. At that point, he was not a threat, not in any way, shape or form.
It certainly appears that the shooter and the officer who kicked Corey while he was on the ground were acting out of an emotional response, out of anger. They tell us these are professionals. They need to be better than that.
Bottom-line, there is absolutely no justification for lethal force in this situation. Granted, Corey had a criminal history. But he’d also been struggling with homelessness and poverty. He was a person who had children and a family. He was a person and deserved better.
And at that time, he wasn’t doing anything that was an actual threat to the community, at least to justify the kind of force that was used against him.
There are some technical issues that may have contributed to this tragedy.
First, the Madison Police Department does not use body cameras. This has been a bone of contention for years, and for whatever reason, the city just has not been able to get this done.
Second, MPD rules of engagement do not emphasize deescalation, at least not to the extent that they did years ago. As I understand, the notion was that MPD viewed deescalation as putting its officers at a disadvantage.
This is certainly no longer David Couper’s MPD. Couper served as MPD Police Chief from 1969 to 1993. He started the job at the height of protests against the Vietnam War, when tear gas and head-cracking were commonplace tactics by local police. He worked very hard to change all of that, highly influenced by the examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
I remember a conversation I had with a friend who was a captain with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department. He said the chief, who was a strong believer in freedom of speech and assembly, placed a strong emphasis on deescalation and made sure that her officers had the training and equipment needed to live up to her vision of how the department should conduct itself.
He also said that the MPD was light years behind the UWPD in this regard.
One other factor involves the Madison Police Civilian Oversight Board and its Office of the Independent Police Monitor, entities created in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Sadly, these entities have not been particularly effective, due to lack of funding and lack of will from city government. However, recently hired Independent Police Monitor Aeiramique Glass has shown a willingness to push the envelope and has been very out front and proactive since Corey was murdered.
Oh, and we must not forget about the general militarization of police departments across the nation. Increasingly, departments are acquiring military hardware, which results in a more martial mindset where police take an us versus them attitude when dealing with civilians.
But all this is just nibbling around the edges. If we are to confront what happened to Corey, we must confront the fact that racism played a significant role.
I doubt the shooter was actually a card-carrying member of the KKK. That said, it is clear that implicit bias exists within him and within so many of the interactions that Madison police have with Black citizens.
Dane County incarcerates and arrests Black citizens at highly disproportionate rates compared to much of the rest of the country.
The Dane County Black arrest rate is eleven times higher than the White rate and is also twice as high as the U.S. Black arrest rate The incarceration rate for Black residents is more than twice the national incarceration rate. About 10 percent of all Black people are arrested at least once a year in Dane County as opposed to one percent for all other racial and ethnic groups.
This racism is also reflected in rates of use-of-force incident by the MPD. More than half of the Department’s use-of-force incidents last year were against Black citizens, yet Black residents represent about seven percent of Madison’s population.
About 72 percent of the Madison officers who engaged in use of force incidents last year, including the use of a Taser or pepper spray, were white, and nearly 76 percent of MPD officers were white.
The picture is as stark as it is grim.
Little wonder people are angry, and little wonder that protests in Madison following the murder of George Floyd turned violent.
That’s not the story this time around. The protests have been peaceful while sending the strong message that there cannot be business as usual until there is justice for Corey. Protesters occupied last week’s Concerts on the Square, which was held the day after the murder. The event was canceled. This week’s Concerts on the Square was also canceled, as was last weekend’s beloved street fair AtwoodFest.
The site of the murder has been occupied and preserved not just as a holy place but as a place for organizing and action. Very quickly a well-organized encampment was established with tents and food and drinks and the closure of two to three city blocks. It’s been a place where people can plan and launch protests but also it has been a place to gather where people chant and sing and play music and hold teach-ins, while organizing marches and other actions. The encampment has also been trying to self-police because they don’t want police in this space. I made a short visit to the encampment today and witnessed the enforced against someone who had been 86ed.
The encampment is also home, at least for now, to one of the raised fist statues by Minneapolis-based artist and activist jordan jamal powell karis that was brought in from George Floyd Square. The statue is “a symbol of solidarity and power, collectiveness and unity, and that we all belong,” according to the artist.
One of the purposes of the statues was to help to hold the space, and the same notion holds true on Willy Street. There seems to be sense of being in it for the long haul. One organizer compared the encampment to the Birmingham Bus Boycott, which last 382 days, suggesting that if it takes that long, that’s how long they’ll hold out.
Something must change, something substantive. We can’t eliminate racism or institutional racism or implicit bias. We can try to be better as individual, and we can demand a reimagining of our police departments.
To paraphrase one of the encampment occupiers, if the police are the be all and end all of our safety and security, we will be neither safe nor secure.
Say his name:
Corey Ruiz.
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