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By Khaleda Rahman
National Correspondent
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The fatal police shooting of a man in Madison, Wisconsin, has sparked uproar, with protesters demanding accountability.
But unlike in other police shootings, footage from the officers’ body-worn cameras won’t be released—because the Madison Police Department’s officers don’t have them.
So far, only cellphone video has surfaced of the moment Corey Durell Ruiz, 38, was shot and killed in the middle of an intersection on Wednesday.
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The lack of body camera footage means the community won’t be able to see a key perspective of the moments leading up to the shooting, when police say Ruiz pulled a knife during a struggle with four officers, injuring one of them.
Why No Body-Worn Cameras?
And it has also put the spotlight on why the Madison Police Department doesn’t require body-worn cameras. The force of around 500 is among the largest in the Midwest that doesn’t use the cameras.
In November last year, the Madison Common Council rejected a proposal introduced by former Alder Isadore Knox Jr., who left the council earlier this year after choosing not to seek reelection, to redirect funding from a police oversight group to a body-camera program in a 17-3 vote. Several members who voted against the amendment told Newsweek they support body-worn cameras, but that the amendment in question would have taken funding from a police oversight group
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Madison Common Council President Sabrina Madison said on Thursday that a police request for the allocation of $414,800 for a three-year rollout of the program is expected to be approved by the council.
She told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that even though the council had rejected the amendment last year, it had encouraged the Madison Police Chief John Patterson to have a budget for 2027 that would include body-worn cameras.
"Last November, we committed to body-worn cameras, and I have not seen or heard from other alders that they're thinking differently," Madison told the Journal Sentinel.
Newsweek has contacted the members of the council for comment via email.
A 'False Choice'
Some council members have said they are in support of body-worn cameras, but rejected the amendment last year because it had sought to redirect funds from the city’s new Office of the Independent Police Monitor (OIM).
“I fully support body-worn cameras. They are an important tool for transparency, de-escalation, and public trust,” Alder Badri Lankella wrote in an online post explaining his vote. “But I cannot support body-worn cameras at the cost of dismantling a citizen-built oversight system, especially when the community was not given proper notice or opportunity to weigh in on such a major change.”
Lankella told Newsweek: "My vote against the November amendment was not a vote against body-worn cameras. It was a vote against a proposal that would have funded the program by reducing resources for the Office of the Independent Monitor and civilian oversight. I did not believe the City should have to choose between two important accountability measures."
He added: "As the Council considers a dedicated funding proposal for body-worn cameras, I look forward to evaluating it on its own merits rather than through the lens of competing priorities."
Alder Tag Evers told Newsweek that the amendment "pitted the Office of the Independent Monitor and the Police Civilian Oversight Board against Body-Worn Cameras in a zero-sum game framing. It wasn't a serious amendment."
Evers said if it had passed, no cameras would have been purchased. "Purchasing cameras falls under the Capital Budget. We were debating the Operating Budget," he said.
Alder Davy Mayer told Newsweek that of the three alders who voted for the amendment, one "has since gone on the record saying she now supports the OIM and wouldn’t vote the same way again, and another is no longer on Council, having not sought re-election."
Katey Nelson, a member of the police civilian oversight board, said the amendment had presented residents with a “false choice.”
“There are cuts that can be made with the Madison Police Department or the County Sheriff’s department, but they’re trying to pit similar agendas against each other,” she said.
Prioritizing Homelessness Crisis
Madison voted against the cameras last year due to budget concerns.
She said in recent years, local officials have been preoccupied with finding shelter for a homeless population that has grown since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was like: if we’re going to figure out anything, we’re going to figure out how to fund shelter operations,” Madison said on Thursday. “So the last couple years, that’s where the focus has been.”
Wednesday’s shooting also puts a spotlight on that crisis since Ruiz was homeless. “He fell on tough times,” Jazzman Brown, 36, of Madison, who said she attended high school with Ruiz, told Newsweek on Thursday.
Concerns Over Policy
Other members of the council have said they supported the premise of body cameras, but were hesitant to approve a program without having an established policy in place.
"In the next budget cycle (which we are in now), we will have a serious conversation about how to implement police body cams, the complicated policies around data retention and disbursal and how to fund the program," Mayer told Newsweek.
He said in a post ahead of the vote in November that he was “absolutely not ready to increase MPD's budget by $400,000 tonight without careful review of how such a program will operate, what safeguards will be in place and what the actual cost would be to do it correctly."
Alder Will Ochowicz said in a post on Friday that he voted against the amendment because purchasing cameras "without a plan in place for redacting and releasing footage does nothing to help transparency, trust, or accountability."
He wrote that the main reason he voted against that amendment "is that buying the cameras is not the primary cost of using body cameras."
Ochowicz said an initial report had estimated the price of body worn cameras for all of Madison's officers to be between $3 to 6 million.
"However, body worn camera footage requires storage space, software, and staff to manage open records requests and redact personal details from footage before releasing," he wrote. "Just the staff costs were estimated at $300,000 per year, which also does not take into account the annual software costs or the storage costs. None of those costs were accounted for in the operating budget that year."
Meanwhile, a 2021 feasibility study noted concern from community groups worried that the cameras would be used to surveil and criminalize marginalized groups.
Update 7/27/26, 7:42 a.m. ET: This story was updated with comments from the alders.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Daniel Orton, Edward Pearcey and Emma Lee-Sang.
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