On August 4th, 2026, at approximately 5am, officers from the Madison Police Department and the Wisconsin State Patrol surrounded the Corey Ruiz Memorial Vigil at the intersection of Willy St. and S. Baldwin. These police officers cowered behind the city workers tasked with descending upon the barricades in Bobcats, bulldozers, and garbage trucks. The police only engaged with the volunteers when they were comfortably armed to the teeth in riot gear. With overwhelming force, they brutalized the protesters at the Vigil.
Verbal reports provided to Madison Area DSA included statements that police forces threw protesters onto broken glass, comrades were bound and carried like suitcases, and these brutes gloated about their mistreatment of the volunteers and houseless people at the memorial. These armed forces of the state profaned a community space that, through 13 days of sustained care, served a need for collective grief and remembrance of a man murdered at their hands.
Here is the so-called “peaceful” transition encouraged by Mayor Satya in her correspondence with the general public. Let us all remember just what Mayor Satya means whenever she dares to speak about “peace.” Peace for whom? Certainly this is not peace for the houseless of Madison. Not for Black and brown working class people. For Mayor Satya, peace is the restoration of convenience for the white and well-off. Peace is the end of the community’s disruption of a system that has murdered Corey Ruiz, Tony Robinson, and Richard Lee Johnson. That is Mayor Satya’s “peace.”
Prior to 5am on August 4th, the memorial site was calm. There were no altercations reported to the Madison Area DSA. Individuals de-escalated potential conflicts through their own efforts, demonstrating that the MPD is incompetent in their role of maintaining order. For a short time, the houseless people of Madison had somewhere safe to sleep, demonstrating that the city government is incompetent in their role of providing for the people. The community stepped up where our government failed. That evening demonstrated what the organizers on the ground already knew– we keep us safe. Mayor Satya’s vision of public safety is hiding behind a line of riot police marching down Willy street, while never meeting face-to-face with the protesters demanding that she and the MPD take accountability for a state-sanctioned murderer.
The true threat to the public safety of Madison is Mayor Satya’s incompetent governance and the MPD. It’s the structural violence of homelessness that imminently threatens every wage-worker who is one missed rent payment, one traumatic injury, or one catastrophe away from a fate of complete dehumanization. It’s the racial violence of the carceral state where the police may kill Black and brown people with impunity–where a murderer can walk free as long as that murder is funded by tax-payer money. The biggest threat to our public safety is allowing this system to continue.
The Madison Area DSA condemns Mayor Satya in mishandling the Corey Ruiz Vigil and sanctioning the MPD’s brutal treatment of the protesters. We join other community organizations, such as Freedom Inc., the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and local individual Black organizers, in demanding the immediate arrest of the murderer cop Kiel Baitinger-Peterson. We demand the funding and empowerment of an independent Office of the Independent Police Monitor and Police Civilian Oversight Board, and to provide all information requested by them immediately. We demand justice for Corey Ruiz, and others murdered by racist state violence.
We stand with the rest of Madison. We demand community control of the police.
Executive Committee
Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America