Madison's body-camera discourse and the endless cry of "if only"

Yahara Flyer | Flight 001 | September 2026

For the main piece of this inaugural issue, I examined Madison's rush to get police body cameras in the wake of the murder of Corey Ruiz. Expect more on this in future YF issues.

Crane's Croak, a monthly column of observations, anecdotes, and other brief miscellany.

Find it in print while copies last, or subscribe at the $10/month Marsh level or above for the option to receive issues by mail. Grab the PDF below if you'd like to read it on a tablet or e-reader.

Madison's body-camera discourse and the endless cry of "if only"

At times in the past month, I have genuinely wondered what disturbs people more: That a man is dead, or that we don't have more video of his killing.

The Madison Police Department murdered Corey Ruiz on July 22, 2026.The response from Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway and other elected officials has overwhelmingly fixated on a renewed push to equip all MPD patrol officers with body cameras. Bodycams are top of mind in news coverage and commentaries. Some of the people out there marching and protesting want bodycams too.Madison’s Interim Independent Police Monitor, Aeiramique Glass, called out the lack of bodycams in a recent statement. Even Ruiz's family and the attorneys they've hired say it's a problem.

I can't fault the family for wanting every possible piece of evidence that might get them some semblance of justice. But I do fault MPD, our Mayor, Alders, and media for their myopic fixation on a tool that would never have saved Ruiz’s life.

It is very telling that calls for bodycams almost all imagine the same scenario: If only those officers had bodycams, Corey Ruiz would still be dead, but we'd have more footage of the events leading up to his death. In this hypothetical, every decision the cops made would remain unchanged. The institution of policing itself would remain unchanged, but for the addition of these cameras recording the situation.

Here is my plea to ardent bodycam proponents: If your sense of possibility of what we can achieve with bodycams is that fucking thin, please ask yourself why you are making it your central and most urgent priority. What else could you be working toward instead of, or in addition to, this one thing? (Look, I’m not even sure I’m dead-set against bodycams per se. I just think we need entirely different systems from policing as we know it.) I don’t ask you to reject a policy solution merely because it doesn’t solve an entire tangle of interrelated problems. I’m just asking you to acknowledge the nature and extent of the tangle. It’s bigger and more stubborn than anything you’ve ever pulled out of a shower drain.

The bodycam discussion is pointedly not about preventing police from killing more people. It is not about making sure that people facing the problems Corey Ruiz faced get what they need, instead of getting a long cycle of punishment and neglect that ultimately makes them far more likely to have a violent encounter with police.

If you're an elected official seriously considering giving MPD the funding for bodycams, then at bare minimum you need to bargain, hard.Police and police unions want bodycams. Use the leverage that gives you.Get some concessions that would actually make police less likely to kill. Make MPD actually cooperate with the city's nascent civilian police oversight agency. Otherwise, all you’re doing is getting a superficial win that doesn’t require you to challenge the police or dig toward the roots of the problem.

We as a society have set police up to use force and coercion—not as a regrettable last resort, but as the core of policing’s function and identity. (I’d hope the most pro-cop and anti-cop people could agree on at least this much.) Through more than a century’s worth of policy choices, we’ve made modern policing as durable and reliably lethal as the most finely crafted gun money can buy. We must handle it the same way. Always assume it’s loaded. Don’t point it at anyone you’re not willing to destroy. Stick a new accessory on there, and it's still a gun, with the same basic mechanisms and the same power to kill. You have not fundamentally altered the options: shoot or don’t.

While holding individual cops responsible for their behavior, we must hold ourselves and our institutions responsible as well. We have created a decision tree where—perversely and horrifically—murders like this make sense. They're extreme outcomes, but not aberrations, and not rare.

We are the storied gunmaker who built this machine. It is doing exactly what we have asked it to do. It kills. We keep maintaining it and telling people to use it in all manner of situations. If we want different outcomes, we need different machines entirely.

We are well into the era of body cameras. A majority of police agencies in the United States use them. (Estimates vary, but we crossed that mark sometime in the past decade.And I get how this can make it feel like we in Madison are being deprived of a bare-minimum tool.) Police are still killing people. A lot of people. The Mapping Police Violence project estimates that in 2026 so far, police have killednearly800 people across 48 states and D.C. Apart from a 5% decrease between 2024 and 2025, the project's long-term data shows that police killings have gone up since 2013. “There have been 10 days so far in 2026 when police did not kill people in the U.S.,” reads an auto-updating infographic on the Mapping Police Violence homepage.

Proponents are usually honest enough to admit that bodycams aren't a panacea. Yet they treat bodycams as the urgent must-have of the moment. They don't follow through enough to define an overall toolkit that would create the conditions for body cameras to make a real difference. For instance, footage should be controlled by an independent civilian agency, so that police cannot illegally withhold it from the public or strategically time its release to manipulate the news cycle. Laws and procedures and disciplinary systems from the federal level on down need to change so that any truly damning evidence will actually lead to consequences.

Without these and other changes surrounding bodycams, we will just be feeding more footage into a system that largely shields police from accountability. Even with these things accomplished,we will still have a whole lot of dense tangle to dislodge.

If we stake too much on bodycams, we will end up disappointed. We will delay the necessary work of transforming how our society approaches public safety. The only guarantee is that we'll have more footage of more deaths.

Note: There is so much more about local bodycam discourse—particularly the narrative that places all the blame for MPD's lack of bodycams on stubborn Alders and left-wing activists—that I will need to unpack in a future issue. Maybe several future issues. Consider this piece the first of a series.

Crane's Croak

• Madison bar book sightings: Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolfe (bold choice, hard enough to follow dead sober). A Harry Potter book (no, I don’t know or care which one, also come on). The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins (essential history of ugly U.S.-fueled anticommunism abroad). Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg (reader described the plot to me and I’m definitely curious… sicko mode, I say with admiration). Bar locations withheld to protect people who are trying to read.
• If you get why Flock cameras are a problem, think about how body cameras might be related.
• Helpful for anyone who gets around the North Side on bike: Huxley Street now goes all the way through to Commercial Avenue.
• “This should be an outside city, but smoke, rain, and temperature are turning it into an indoor city,” observes Jesse Raub of Madison.
• Madison cops swarming a literal George Floyd monument in riot gear.
• When was the last time we had a good feud in local media? I don’t have the energy lately, but someone should start one.
• Submit your anecdotes, observations, bar-reader sightings, and other brief miscellany to Crane’s Croak at: cranescroak@proton.me