Catch and Release, Wisconsin Style |
Corey Durell Ruiz died on a public street in Madison, Wisconsin, on July 22 with a fixed-blade knife in his hand and roughly 40 prior convictions on his record. Within forty-eight hours, protesters had stormed a police press conference, civil rights attorney Ben Crump had flown in to call the shooting an “execution,” and the mayor was promising a “rigorous” investigation of the officer. Nobody at either microphone asked the obvious question: why was a man with 15 years of documented violent conduct, including two felony convictions for assaulting police, riding a bicycle through a residential neighborhood on a weekday afternoon instead of sitting in a cell?
Every business I've worked in treats a documented pattern of past behavior as the best predictor of future behavior. Every business, apparently, except the one we task with keeping violent repeat offenders off the street.
Here's what the record shows. Wisconsin public records reviewed by NBC News list roughly 40 misdemeanor and felony convictions for Ruiz from 2009 to 2025, including felony resisting an officer with substantial bodily harm and felony threats against police in 2021, per Urban Milwaukee, and two counts of strangulation and robbery by force in 2009. In between: theft, disorderly conduct, drug possession, bail jumping, and auto theft, per a history compiled from Wisconsin court records. It reads less like a rap sheet than a career.
By the time of the shooting, Ruiz was homeless, and his family has said he struggled with addiction. Those are real hardships, and I don't discount them. But they don't explain a 40-count record that includes two counts of strangulation, a robbery by force,........