Campaign statement · July 24, 2026

Statement from Jack Ordman on the Killing of Corey Ruiz

MADISON, Wis. - On Wednesday afternoon, a Madison police officer fatally shot a Black man at the intersection of Williamson and South Baldwin streets, in the middle of the day, in front of his neighbors. On Thursday, authorities identified him as Corey Ruiz. He was 38 years old, and he was a father.

To Corey Ruiz's family and all those who loved him: please accept my sincere condolences. My grief is with you, and with the neighbors who witnessed and recorded such a tragic event. No family should experience what Corey Ruiz's family experienced on Wednesday, and no child should grow up carrying what his death leaves behind. Our community is devastated, and Madison mourns the tragic killing of Corey Ruiz. His life mattered.

I held this statement until now on purpose: the first days belonged to the people who loved Corey Ruiz and those most directly affected by his death, not to politics. But some things must be said before the first story hardens.

None of the four police officers involved in the shooting wore a body camera. The only reason the public has any record of this horrific event is because of the brave neighbors who recorded footage on their phones. I have watched that footage more than once. What I saw was an execution. I do not use that word for effect. The department calls the Taser unsuccessful, but the footage shows it did its job: it put him on the ground. He was down, and an officer standing over him fired three shots to the head at close range anyway. A witness standing ten feet away used the same word, as did State Representative Francesca Hong.

The investigation now belongs to the state Division of Criminal Investigation, per Wisconsin law, and the decision to file charges will belong to the District Attorney. I am calling for this process to run efficiently and transparently. If the investigation surfaces facts that the video footage does not, I will say so publicly. This is what prioritizing the facts over spin means. The officer who used deadly force against Corey Ruiz should have been disarmed at the scene, and the officers involved must be removed from duty while the investigation is ongoing. Integrity requires that the standard every civilian in this country lives under be applied equally, without regard to the uniform. This is the two-tiered justice system that I am running against.

I have been warning about where this leads for months, in public, on the record. On April 15th I wrote publicly, and to a member of the county oversight board, that escalation was coming, three days before the Sheriff's office met a nonviolent crowd with tear gas. Days before the shooting, my campaign site said this:

God forbid Dane County ever has an officer-involved shooting: that night, the first account the public gets will come from the same podium. An account of a protest that could not survive the public footage is the account we would be asked to trust about a shooting. We have seen where that leads, over and over, around the country.

I wrote that about the Sheriff's office. Wednesday's events were those of the Madison Police Department, under city command, and Sheriff Barrett is not accountable for the shots fired. However, the sheriff is the county's senior elected law enforcement officer, and for three months, the example set at the top of Dane County law enforcement has included an on-camera account of April 18th that has never been substantiated by evidence and has never been corrected, and an office that has denied all six of the public records requests I filed. The standard is not complicated. A law enforcement official at a podium after a use of force event owes the public what is substantiated, a plain accounting of what is not yet known, and a correction the moment the record says otherwise. Our eyes do not deceive us. When officials spin the narrative anyway, when their statements ask the public to choose between the podium and their own eyes, and when corrections are never issued, that is blatant misconduct, not a communications strategy. People are sick of it. So am I. When officials cross that line, act in bad faith, or put their careers ahead of the truth, they must be held accountable every time, no matter the rank, no matter the uniform.

Chief Patterson will now stand at the podium during the hardest week his department has faced in years, with the facts still surfacing. I sincerely hope that he conducts himself with more integrity and accuracy to the record than Sheriff Barrett has shown since April 18th. But a county should not be left hoping. This is the sad state of affairs I am openly running against. Whether the record in Dane County stays straight right now depends on the character of whoever holds the podium, because the systems that would keep the record straight, including body cameras on every officer, records produced when the public asks, and corrections made as a duty rather than a concession, have been postponed, denied, or are missing. Wednesday showed where that leaves us, with four officers, zero body cameras, and the truth of a man's death resting on bystander footage.

This neighborhood already knows what that costs. Eleven years ago, about a block away from the same street, Madison police shot and killed 19-year-old Tony Robinson. Different mayor, different police chief, different sheriff. Same street, same grief, same questions.

The city must release every video and record the law allows, promptly. Release the officers' names. As the evidence comes in, the department must square its words with the footage and quickly correct anything that does not survive the evidence. Madison cannot afford to wait for a 2027 budget line to put cameras on its officers. The chief asking for them is right to ask, and this is the proof. Body cameras protect the public, and they protect every officer whose account is true. If the officer's life was in imminent danger, a body camera would be his best witness today. No one who tells the truth is harmed by a record of it.

Corey Ruiz was a father. His family will live in a county that watched him die on a phone screen. The least this county owes them is the entire record, quickly, and officials who would rather be corrected than protected. No county should accept less. Ours gets to vote.

Media contact: info@ordman.org · (608) 708-5225
Paid for by Ordman for Sheriff.