Why Police Use-of-Force Videos Mislead the Public: Two Use-of-Force Experts on the Madison Shooting of Corey Ruiz

Jamie Borden and Danny King have analyzed more than a thousand use-of-force incidents. Six days after Corey Ruiz was killed, they explained why the public had already reached a verdict the evidence cannot support — in either direction.

Six days after a Madison police officer shot and killed 38-year-old Corey Ruiz, two retired Nevada police officers who make their living analyzing exactly these events sat down in front of a camera to say something almost nobody else in the conversation was saying.

They did not know what happened. Neither did anyone else. And that, they argued, was the whole point.

“What you cannot do is 30 seconds after a video hits the internet, come to a conclusion,” said Danny King. “You cannot do that.”

By the time King and Jamie Borden recorded their review, the July 22, 2026 shooting at Williamson and Baldwin streets already had a settled public meaning. Bystander video was circulating widely. Elected officials in Madison were using the word execution. Calls for the officer’s arrest had been made publicly. The Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI), which by state law must conduct the outside review of any death in police custody, had barely begun.

Borden and King’s session runs nearly an hour and a half and reaches no verdict. The absence is deliberate, and Borden states it on the record.

“There is no verdict in this analysis, and that’s by design,” he says. “The analysis reaches no conclusion on whether the shooting was justified or unjustified. Both conclusions are currently unsupported for the same reason. The deciding evidence has not yet been gathered, disclosed, or tested.”

What the conversation offers instead is more durable than a verdict: a working method for how ordinary citizens — and, pointedly, police officers themselves — might think about a violent event they have watched on a screen and cannot possibly have understood.

Who are Jamie Borden and Danny King?

Jamie Borden and Danny King are retired Henderson, Nevada police officers who specialize in use-of-force analysis, forensic video review, and critical incident investigation. Between them they have reviewed, analyzed, or consulted on more than a thousand use-of-force incidents.

Danny King spent 24 years as a police officer, 18 of them on the street as a first responder. He has used, by his own description, all levels of force. He then spent six years off the road teaching force, roughly five and a half of those investigating and reviewing what amounted to more than a thousand use-of-force incidents. He has since consulted with police departments across the world, worked internal investigations in which officers were fired over allegations of unreasonable force, and testified as an expert witness in cases where officers faced criminal accusation. He has 12 to 14 years of training and experience in forensic video analysis. “It’s been my life on a daily basis,” he says. “Just force.”

Jamie Borden retired as a sergeant from the same agency. The final 11 years of his career were devoted specifically to being a subject matter specialist in use of force: training, scenario design, decision-making analysis, and shoot / don’t-shoot simulator work. He was a senior and lead instructor for a major force analysis company for nine years before founding Critical Incident Review, where he teaches force analysis, forensic video review and examination, and the investigative principles underlying decision-making. He has handled more than 400 cases as a sergeant and as a retired officer, including some very high-profile incidents in this country.

Together the two men built and ran their agency’s use-of-force training and analysis unit, responsible for reviewing, analyzing, and reporting on every use of force in the department that exceeded a firm grip — approximately 500 cases a year. They also designed more than a thousand officer-involved-shooting scenarios, placing officers under deliberately extreme stress to study what human beings actually do when the clock is running.

Their stated purpose is narrow. “The purpose of this particular video is to tell people, citizens, that this is far more complex than you would believe,” King says.

What is actually known about the Corey Ruiz shooting, and what is still contested?

As of the date of this analysis, nearly every fact that would decide whether the shooting was lawful remains contested or unreleased. The confirmed record covers the outline of the encounter. It does not cover the moment of the shooting.

“The decisive facts are all contested in this case,” Borden says. “Whether Ruiz held the knife when shot, his degree of restraint, the timing and severity of the officer’s injuries, where the round struck — every case-deciding question is disputed and awaits unreleased evidence.”

The bicycle claim illustrates how quickly an assumption hardens into public fact. “We see him ride behind a vehicle, and when the bike comes out the other side, he’s not on it. He’s falling off,” Borden says. “Now, he could have been knocked off the bike. He could have hit a curb and fallen off the bike. Any of those things are true.” What is missing is a verifiable statement from a vantage point that could have seen it, or footage showing it definitively. “The overwhelming narrative right now is that officers knocked him off the bike. We just don’t know.”

Does this discipline cut against the officers’ defenders too?

Yes — and Borden applies it to his own early impression on the record. In the first days, the claim circulated that two officers had been stabbed. The official record supports one knife injury plus one injury of unclear origin. “Countering a premature narrative cannot rely on its own premature claims,” Borden says.

That symmetry runs through the entire analysis. “We’re trying to maintain middle ground here to give you some foundation to take a breath,” he says, “and not let emotional conductivity drive inaccurate beliefs either for or against the officers.”

Why do people reach conclusions about police videos within hours?

Because a disturbing image produces an emotional response fast enough to substitute for analysis — a mechanism Borden calls emotional conductivity. The feeling arrives, and it does the work that evidence was supposed to do.

King insists on a starting point before any technical analysis. “Let’s start off in the analysis we’re talking about this with the idea that Corey Ruiz was a human being,” he says. “Immaterial of the facts and circumstances, immaterial of what we’re going to talk about, he’s a human being.” Even in a conversation this technical, he says, the risk is that it starts to sound like data. “We have a visceral reaction to watching someone get killed or dying. That’s okay. That means that you’re a human being.”

What it cannot be is the measuring instrument. “That cannot be the metric by which we determine whether something is reasonable or unreasonable.”

What is emotional conductivity?

Emotional conductivity is the term Borden’s Critical Incident Review courses use for the process by which a disturbing video generates a feeling, and the feeling is then converted directly into a conclusion of wrongdoing without passing through evidence.

“If you’re a human being and not a sociopath, you are going to respond emotionally to something as tragic as this incident,” Borden says. “There’s no two ways around it. A human being lost their life. And that’s as unfavorable as it gets. And it’s okay to be mad.”

The failure is what happens next. “Those things that we think, feel, and believe based off the optics from that two-dimensional distorted video cannot be a passionate belief of wrongdoing until it’s proven.”

King’s prescription is four steps: feel it, label it, set it aside, then do the work.

“Let’s feel that emotion. Let’s label it. And now let’s set it to the side because we have a job to do. Because if Corey Ruiz was wronged, we need to know that, but we need to prove it by facts. If Corey Ruiz did wrong, we need to know that, but by facts — not by the emotion of it. And that emotion can take over.”

Why doesn’t video show what the officer experienced?

Because video is a two-dimensional, compressed, fixed-perspective recording of a three-dimensional event that a human being experienced through two eyes, from one position, under stress, filtered by attention. The camera records the scene. It does not record perception.

“One of the primary things that we want to make the public aware of is to kind of assist you in understanding that what you see in video is not what the officers experienced,” Borden says. He is immediate about what that is not: “That’s not an advocation. That’s not in support of what the officers did.”

Video, he explains, serves as “a roadmap of the officer’s experience in that moment, which is three dimensional, captured through two lenses and interpreted through the cognitive process.” Before a viewer can assess behavior, they have to understand the medium. “We need to know what we’re looking at in terms of a technical understanding of the video before we can start looking for the behavior and the content of the video.”

How does camera capture differ from human perception?

A body-worn or bystander camera and a human being under threat record fundamentally different things. The gaps below are the ordinary, documented differences between the two systems — not excuses, and not evidence of wrongdoing in either direction. They are the reason a truthful officer narrative can diverge from footage of the same event.

The final asymmetry is the one Borden and King return to most. “Because we have a video, we can watch this as many times as we want to,” King says. “It’s incredibly important to recognize the absolute frailty in a human being’s recognition, attention, and so on.”

What is final frame theory?

Final frame theory is the error of judging a shooting by the subject’s body position at the instant the round is fired — a frame that is the result of the decision, not its cause.

“That decision didn’t happen at the time shots were fired,” Borden says. “That decision happened at a point that preceded it. Every action is preceded by a decision, which is preceded by an orientation to what was observed. All of those occupy time on the timeline.”

How much time? In their experience reviewing forensic video, the decision point sits roughly half a second before the shot — about 15 to 17 frames at 30 frames per second, or some 30 milliseconds per frame. “That’s the catalyst frame, if you will, in the video,” Borden says. King puts the range on human decision-making at as fast as three tenths of a second, sometimes greater than six tenths.

“It’s a human condition that it takes time to see something, make sense of it, drive forward in action with that decision and pull the trigger,” Borden says. “That occupies time. It’s not an instantaneous thing.”

There is a corollary that constrains officers as much as it protects them. “If it takes time to start an action, it takes time to stop an action,” Borden says. He returns to it more than an hour later: “Once you’ve fired that neuromuscular motor impulse to pull the trigger, that marble has gone down the pipe. When you see something that changes the behavior or that says, I need to stop, you have to send another marble. The first marble’s always going to come out.”

Which is precisely why the frames before the shot deserve scrutiny rather than a pass. “I’d like to see what position those hands were in at the time that leg came up,” Borden says. “Those are all going to be those catalyst moments where the decision was driven forward that led that officer to shoot. We just don’t have that information.”

Neither does anyone insisting they already know.

Why does slow motion make video misleading?

Slow motion increases perceived intent for every person in the frame — officer and subject alike — because it converts continuous motion into a sequence of deliberate-looking poses.

“When you watch video in slow motion, it increases the level of perceived intent on all sides,” King says. “When you watch it frame by frame, it increases the perceived intent of the officer and of the individual. So it leads us to believe that the officer here did what they did knowingly.”

Neither inference is earned by the footage. Almost all public analysis of this incident has occurred in slow motion or in stills.

What are perceptual narrowing and auditory exclusion?

Perceptual narrowing and auditory exclusion are documented stress responses in which a person’s attention constricts so severely that information physically available to them is never processed. They are why an officer may not hear a shouted warning that is unmistakable on the recording.

On the Madison video, a voice can be heard yelling he’s got a knife. Sitting on a couch with the volume up, it is obvious.

“Doesn’t mean that the officer in that particular circumstance heard that,” King says.

Borden explains the mechanism. “Our brains are filtering through the majority of information that surrounds us. The heat on our skin, how our feet feel in our shoes, the discomfort in my back from standing up here for an hour and 47 minutes and 31 seconds. But these things, they’re not a focus of attention until I direct my attention to that.” Under threat, the filtering intensifies. “I’ve been involved in these types of scenarios where I’m so focused on a threat that I’m not hearing radio traffic. I’m not hearing commands or other vehicles arriving code three. I don’t hear those things. Doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

The consequence for how statements are read afterward is significant. “What it looks like in an interview in the aftermath is deceit,” Borden says. “It’s not deceit. It’s the human mind filtering out information.”

The correct investigative question, he adds, is not whether a sound existed. “It’s not whether the sound was there to be heard. It’s whether the officer heard it.”

Why do four officers at one scene give four different accounts?

Because each officer occupies what Borden calls a contextual bubble — a distinct perceptual position that can produce radically different accounts despite the officers standing feet apart.

“Perspectives are so vehemently different in these cases, even though it appears that the officers are in close proximity,” Borden says. “That’s why in a case like this, each officer that’s involved is a separate case.”

A proper investigation treats each involved officer as a standalone interview, then looks for consistency inside the inherent inconsistencies. “We will very rarely ever get a pristine common thread that ties all of these consistent statements together” — and its absence, he notes, is not itself evidence of anything.

King warns against the related error of grading officers against each other. “You have four officers who are trying to work in unison, but ultimately you have four different perceptions of the incident,” he says. The public tendency is to treat one officer’s restraint as proof another officer’s force was unnecessary: this officer thought it was safe to use a Taser — why did that officer fire? Different bubbles, different information, different decisions.

What is hindsight bias in a use-of-force review?

Hindsight bias is the automatic tendency to see an outcome as more predictable than it was, and to judge the decision-maker more harshly as a result. It is not a police concept. King and Borden cite the human factors literature — Sidney Dekker, Gary Klein, Daniel Kahneman, David Woods, Erik Hollnagel — whose findings apply to surgeons, pilots, and nuclear operators as readily as to police.

What are the three effects of hindsight on judgment?

King lays out the cascade. Each stage feeds the next.

“First off, you believe that this was more predictable than it actually is,” King says. “You believe this is the logical outcome — everything that occurred is the only logical outcome that was going to occur. The next thing is that because this is the only logical outcome, you had to have known this. And then finally, because you believe it’s the only outcome that could occur and you intentionally engaged in it, you’re judged more harshly.”

Borden traces it back to the emotion. “The emotional conductivity is the root of all of these hindsight attributes. We respond emotionally. We see something we don’t like. There’s a bad optic. We see it as more predictable. We start working backwards and it becomes that should have, would have, could have trap.”

The trap has a specific shape: every decision point found while moving backward from the outcome gets treated as a guarantee. “Attributing to this case what we know in the outcome to those decision points in a guarantee that had they done something different at that point, that it would have had a different or better or more desirable outcome — we cannot. Just as unpredictable as that scene is in the moment, we cannot assign predictability to it in any form or fashion.”

“We have to understand that the officers were making decisions in an event for the first time without the ability to pause, rewind, replay, make an optimal decision,” Borden says.

What legal standard governs police use of force?

Under Graham v. Connor (1989), police use of force is judged under the Fourth Amendment standard of objective reasonableness — from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, under the totality of the circumstances, and without the 20/20 vision of hindsight.

The decision identifies three core factors, commonly called the Graham factors:

Borden names the hindsight prohibition specifically: Graham prohibits “the use of twenty twenty vision of hindsight to judge an officer’s actions in the moment. Anything can be made to look more flawed knowing the outcome.”

What did Barnes v. Felix change?

In Barnes v. Felix (2025), a unanimous Supreme Court rejected the “moment of threat” rule and held that courts must assess the totality of the circumstances, including the events leading up to the use of force. Justice Kagan’s opinion held that courts may not put on “chronological blinders.”

This points in both directions. It means a shooting cannot be judged solely on the freeze-frame — which undercuts video-only condemnation. It also means the wider context of the encounter is legitimately in the analysis, which forecloses the argument that nothing before the final two seconds matters.

One caveat is worth stating precisely, because Barnes is frequently overread: the Court expressly declined to decide whether an officer’s own earlier tactical decisions can render otherwise-reasonable force unreasonable. Justice Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence specifically to flag that this “officer-created jeopardy” question was left open. Earlier events are in the frame as context for what the officer perceived. Whether they can independently create liability is unsettled.

Borden’s own reference is to the practical upshot: the investigation must consider “the broader spectrum of everything they knew moving into it under Barnes v. Felix.”

Which is another way of saying the law itself is still working out how to look at these events.

What do the disputed terms in this case actually mean?

Much of the public heat in police shooting cases comes from words that carry one meaning in law and a different one on social media. The table below sets out the distinctions King and Borden draw.

Is homicide the same as murder?

No. Homicide is a manner of death; murder is a specific criminal charge requiring proof of intent. Suicide, accident, natural causes, and homicide are all manners of death.

“There’s confusion in the public about the term homicide,” King says. “Homicide does not mean murder. It does not mean manslaughter. Homicide is simply a manner of death.”

Borden expands it. “When officers are placed on administrative leave while being investigated for a homicide, that doesn’t mean that there was an intentional act to take a human being’s life. Homicide, suicide, natural causes — these are all manners of death. Homicide is no more significant in that other than the fact that it’s one human being losing their life at the hand of another human being. It doesn’t mean it’s criminal. It doesn’t mean it’s murder. It doesn’t mean it’s manslaughter.”

When Chief Patterson called this “an open and active homicide investigation,” that was a classification, not an accusation. The investigation exists to determine which category applies.

What is the difference between murder and deadly force?

Both are deliberate acts, which is why the terms get swapped. The difference is purpose.

“Murder is the intentional taking of a life of another human being,” Borden says. “The tactic of deadly force is the application of force with the expectation of serious bodily harm or death in the effort to save your own life or the life of someone else as a police officer. Those two narratives are very different.”

Different elements. Different proof. “Execution,” similarly, is a conclusion rather than a description — it asserts intent, premeditation, and absence of threat, three fact questions none of which has been answered. “The whole terminology that the guy was executed was based on what that bystander video shows, not based on the officer’s experience,” Borden says.

What does de-escalation actually mean in policing?

De-escalation in a use-of-force context is a goal, not a verbal tactic — the objective of reaching control and safety using a composite of tactics, of which verbal commands are only one. This is the term both men consider most misunderstood, and the misunderstanding runs in both directions.

Borden draws the distinction: “looking at deescalation as a goal to control an otherwise out of control and unsafe scenario, to use a composite of tactics to reach a level of control and safety. There’s a very different application of deescalation as a goal as opposed to a standalone tactic, which most people, especially outside of law enforcement, reflect on when they hear the term deescalation as a verbal tactic.”

Under that reading, verbal commands are de-escalation. So are control holds and taking a person to the ground. Even a Taser — an escalation of force in isolation — falls “under the umbrella of the goal of deescalation,” Borden says: “using lower levels of force to mitigate the need for higher levels of force until that is no longer effective.”

Can an officer de-escalate someone who will not comply?

No. De-escalation is a two-party event contingent on the behavior of the person being contacted.

“Deescalation is incumbent upon the individual’s behavior that we’re dealing with,” Borden says. “If they are not complying and they are not falling into that deescalation attempt, that is not the officer failing to deescalate. That’s the officer attempting to deescalate and that attempt failing because of the behavior of the subject.”

He is careful about how far the point extends. “I would just ask our citizens to be very cautious on how you accept the narrative of the officer failed to deescalate — remembering that that’s a two way street.”

King illustrates the ceiling with a case from their own agency. A man on a bicycle cut off an officer at a green light. Routine, until it wasn’t: the man had spent most of his adult life in prison for murder and had five knives latched to his bike. He stabbed the officer and went after a second in a rage whose only visible endpoint was killing him. “When it comes down to deescalation, make no mistake, that’s a two party event,” King says. “And there are people that will not be deescalated. And if we think that they can be, we’re doing a disservice to the police officer.”

What is a “posture of compliance,” and why does it matter?

A posture of compliance is the observable behavior of a subject attempting to comply with officers’ commands — turning onto the stomach, splaying the hands, discarding a weapon. It is one of the specific things trained reviewers look for in video, and it maps onto the standard behavioral classifiers used in force analysis:

Borden’s review of the Madison footage is framed in exactly these terms, and he is explicit about its limits. “In the review and the analysis of these cases, especially where video evidence is present, we are looking for a posture of compliance, meaning a subject is attempting to comply with officers’ commands. From what I’ve seen in the limited video review that I’ve done — I’ve not done a full analysis — but there’s never a posture of compliance with the officers at any given moment in this incident.”

“None of those things are present on the video as far as video evidence goes,” he says of the compliance indicators. That observation, he stresses, “doesn’t make anything else right or wrong. It just means that’s what the video shows.”

Does “life over property” apply to this case?

The principle is not disputed. Its application depends on what the encounter became after the initial property complaint.

King concedes the principle without hesitation. “There’s nothing controversial about that. A person’s life should come before the property.”

His objection is to using it as a stopping point. “What we’re doing is we’re glossing over all the facts that occurred on this particular incident. This was by all accounts a property crime up until he resisted law enforcement, up until he produced and armed himself with a knife.”

Borden puts it more sharply. “At the point that he arms himself with a knife, we are certainly not dealing with a property crime anymore. This is an assault and potentially an attempted murder.” The reasoning he objects to is the substitution of the original offense for the one that followed: “We are naive if we’re basing this outcome on the fact that the officers had reasonable suspicion to conduct a lawful Terry stop on an individual for a property crime. That is not the catalyst for the deadly force in this case.”

What authority do police have to stop someone?

Under Terry v. Ohio and its state-law equivalents, an officer with reasonable and articulable suspicion that a person has committed, is committing, or will commit a crime may detain that person to investigate. The officer does not have to be correct.

“A Terry stop is the authority of a police officer to detain someone that they have reasonable and articulable suspicion has, is, or will commit a crime,” King explains. A caller reporting a man trying door handles up and down a block can constitute reasonable suspicion, “which now gives the government the right to detain that person.”

Borden calls the Ruiz encounter “the quintessential reasonable suspicion block.” The officers had a direct report, a description, and a location. “All of those things align that establish not probable cause, but reasonable suspicion.”

He teaches the relationship as construction. “Reasonable suspicions are the blocks that build a wall of probable cause. We cannot build a wall without all of the reasonable suspicion components being in place to reach probable cause. If we cannot build a wall of probable cause with the existing blocks of reasonable suspicion, then that person is free to go on their way.”

Does an officer have to be right to make a lawful stop?

No. King is emphatic. “An officer does not have to be correct. Reasonable suspicion is simply based on my training and experience — do I have reasons to stop this person? There’s no percentage that’s attached to it.” Probable cause, by contrast, means more likely than not: 50.1%.

The purpose of an investigative detention, Borden adds, is to find out. “There’s just as prominent a possibility that the officers find nothing, that person’s not involved and they’re on their way. That’s the whole purpose. It’s an investigative detention.”

What is a citizen legally required to do during a stop?

Comply with the detention and identify yourself. Nothing more.

“They don’t have to confess. They don’t have to let me grill them,” King says. “But at that point, they do have to comply with at least stopping and identifying themselves. When you do not comply with that investigation, when you do not stop for law enforcement, or you don’t provide your identification, that can be considered obstruction or resistance.”

Which is why the sequence in Madison carries legal weight. “Corey takes off. That is a violation of the law in and of itself. So even though we could look and see that Corey actually committed no crime, the fact that he ran off is a crime.”

Where does police authority to use force come from?

From statute — which is to say, from the public. King’s framing of the underlying bargain is the part he most wants readers to sit with.

“The people of Wisconsin, Nevada, California, so on and so forth, they generally want a peaceful and orderly society. There are statutes on the books that make people peace officers. As a citizen, I give the power to a police officer. I have the expectation that when something goes upside down, I pick up the phone. I call 911. And I send a police officer into an unknown circumstance. With that unknown circumstance, I give them special powers. I give them the power to detain someone. I give them the power to arrest that person, to establish probable cause.”

Including, he says, the power to use deadly force — because “in the course of that non-compliance, there’s going to be individuals that purpose to harm a police officer, that purpose to kill a police officer.”

That delegation reframes the question. It is not whether the power should exist. It is, in King’s words, “did the officer do it reasonably or did the officer do it unreasonably? And again, that’s the crux of the investigation.”

Why is it a problem when officials draw conclusions before the investigation?

Because the public assumes an official’s title implies access to evidence, and it usually doesn’t — producing what Borden calls trickle-down bias. The conclusion travels downward with borrowed authority it never had.

To the two men’s knowledge, DCI has not released investigative files to the city officials making public allegations. Which means those conclusions rest on the same source everyone else has: a bystander video, in stills, within hours.

“You have aldermen or councilmen who are elected officials who have made statements about an execution, about murder, who merely by the fact that they are an authority figure, people take that to mean that it’s accurate or that that person knows,” King says. “And I can tell you that it’s obviously not the case, because the facts aren’t out there.”

Borden’s objection is about expertise, not office. “Subject matter specialists in this field are dealing with training and education that is perishable. And you said it earlier — in influential positions that everybody assumes they know what needs to be known to make those types of allegations. I can tell you with a certain level of certainty that the people making these comments are making these comments based off of one still frame of video, or what their emotional conductivity to this video was. They’ve got little to no investigative experience. They aren’t currently investigating crimes. They probably have never investigated crimes. And their conclusions are based on what they think, feel, and believe.”

The damage is procedural. Investigators want to gather evidence, collect statements, and triangulate bystander video against body-worn camera, in-car camera, and physical forensics without bias. That process is now running inside an environment where the conclusion has been publicly announced by people with authority. “The decisions have already been made at this point,” Borden says.

Later he spells out the consequence. “They’ve been public about their conclusions in this case and they’re going to fight against whatever DCI finds and interpret that information in a way that’s going to most significantly benefit the preexisting conclusions that were made prior to any investigation.”

He is unsparing: “Quite frankly, that’s one of the single most irresponsible things that a person of influence can do to their own city. It is agenda based and it serves no meaningful purpose to the community.”

The oversight problem is real in both directions, and King raises it as a question rather than an accusation: would a department turn over investigative documents to a monitor who has already publicly announced a finding of unreasonable force? His own answer preserves the office while faulting the timing. “Even in the absence of that investigation, even in the absence of that documentation, doesn’t mean that you’re not the independent monitor. It doesn’t mean that you can just come to a conclusion.”

Why do investigations take so long?

Because reconstructing a few seconds of a dynamic event requires reconciling video, statements, and forensics from many sources — work measured in weeks and months, not hours.

“We’re working with two timelines and two clocks,” Borden says. “The public narrative reached its verdict in hours. Same day. Execution claims, protests, canceled events. The DCI investigation will take weeks or months. A comparable Dane County case took nearly a year.”

Borden quantifies the workload from his own recent casework: an analysis of a single incident spanning 2.08 seconds produced a 94-page report after roughly three weeks of entrenched, full-time work living in the documents, the investigative file, and the video. Madison will require volumes of data, angles, fly-throughs, statements, and forensics to understand a comparable handful of seconds.

“This requires an intense investigation and supported facts, refuted facts, all of the cross-pollination of video evidence, statement-based evidence, physical and forensic evidence,” Borden says. “And that’s no easy lift. And it certainly cannot happen in six hours.”

Their own review, he is careful to note, is a surface analysis — built from roughly 40 sources, social media, news outlets, and the very few facts Madison police had released at that point. He does not claim otherwise.

What should police officers take from this analysis?

The same discipline, pointed at themselves. Neither man frames the conversation as a defense of officers, and both close that exit deliberately.

“I’m not here to advocate for the officers,” Borden says. “I’m here to tell you that there’s components of this investigation that get far more complex than what the final frame shows.”

King is blunter. “I’m not here to defend cops. I’m here to call balls and strikes.”

Both acknowledge the profession’s record without hedging. “There’s a time where there were police departments or police officers that were not good people, that were doing all the wrong things,” King says. “We’ve seen unreasonable force. I’ve consulted on cases where cops were criminals.” Borden’s response is one word: “Right.”

Their standard applies symmetrically. “If something was wrong and done wrong, or there are malevolent actions in the officers, that’s what we need to know,” Borden says. “If the officers were simply responding to a deadly threat in the best way that they could to survive that threat, we need to know that. But all of that at this point has not been proven or disproven. It’s simply been alleged.”

Borden draws the line the profession should want drawn: “If they are found to be unjustified, unreasonable, malevolent, any of those things, so be it. If the evidence supports it, nobody wants a bad cop out of the mix worse than a good cop, a good citizen, anyone who has respect for our society the way it is today.”

Three practical warnings follow for officers specifically.

1. The statement decision is not routine. King has watched a union attorney nearly walk officers “straight into prison — or not prison, just the circumstances in which you need to pause and consider whether you’re giving a statement or not giving a statement.” This is not a sit-down-and-everything’s-fine event. “That’s one of those ones where you have to sit back and go, are we giving a statement? Does giving a statement hurt us in this situation, or does not giving a statement hurt us worse?”

2. Gaps in your account are normal, not evidence of deception. Because attention filters under stress, an officer’s narrative will have holes. “I wouldn’t expect very concise statements about behaviors in this timeline because most of the officers are focused on the fact that he’s got a knife,” Borden says. An officer who believes he must produce a complete, coherent narrative will fill gaps unconsciously — and the filled gaps become impeachment material. I don’t know is the accurate output of a human nervous system under threat.

3. You are subject to every bias in this analysis. Neither man exempts himself. “Everyone has biases,” King says. “It’s how we survive essentially in life.” He recounts having watched a short clip, formed a firm conclusion, learned the official findings, spoken with someone intimately familiar with the case, and discovered “that everything that I believed about that case from a real clip, a real short clip, was incorrect.”

The moment these principles become a shield rather than a method, they have stopped doing analysis and started doing advocacy.

How should race be considered in this case?

As a real and unresolved question that a single incident cannot answer in either direction. The analysis does not avoid the racial dimension, and it should not be summarized as though it settles it.

Corey Ruiz was a Black man killed by a white officer in a country whose history gives Black Americans specific and well-earned reason to distrust exactly this sequence of events. That distrust is not irrationality; it is memory. Any analysis treating it as noise has already failed.

Borden acknowledges the ground it stands on. “The climate in Wisconsin is very fragile. There are issues with public trust in the law enforcement community. There’s all these issues that exist pre-incident, and those all have to be considered. And the chief was right in saying, I won’t ignore the wounds that this city has already endured.“

His argument is about sequencing, not dismissal: “Those preexisting components should not bleed their way into a decision that was made off of optics from a video that have not been ratified, that have not been reviewed, analyzed, that haven’t been quantified as evidence the way they’ve been driving this narrative.”

Two things have to be held at once, and public conversation rarely holds either for long.

First: a single incident cannot answer a pattern-level question, in either direction. Whether American policing produces racially disparate outcomes is a serious empirical question with a large and contested research literature behind it. It is not resolved by this video, and it is not refuted by this video. Anyone using Madison to prove a system-wide claim is doing the same thing as the person using Madison to prove the system is fine — reasoning from one data point toward a conclusion they brought with them.

Second: the specific claim made in this case is an assertion about one person’s intent, and intent is provable or disprovable by evidence. King poses it as a question rather than a denial: “Do you think that a white police officer in broad daylight in the middle of an intersection wants to kill a black man?” — in 2026, on camera, with four officers present. He does not claim the answer is self-evidently no; he claims it has not been established, and should not be the default. “The facts will come out or the evidence will come out. And listen, if this officer crossed the line, again, so be it. But to think that that is a default —”

Why was Dylann Roof taken alive?

On the available record, the explanation is behavioral: Roof surrendered without resistance. The comparison is raised often and deserves an answer rather than a dismissal.

“People are saying, how is it that a guy that kills nine people can be taken into custody? And why is it that a black man in Wisconsin can’t be taken into custody?” King says. “He just gave up. There was no fight. There was no resistance, not even the hint of resistance.”

It is worth being precise about what that does and does not establish. It accounts for the two outcomes without invoking race. It says nothing about how officers behave when resistance is present — which is precisely where the disparity research lives. A reader can accept the Roof explanation in full and still hold that the harder question is unanswered. That position is internally consistent, and nothing in this analysis forecloses it.

What Borden fears is that the question will not get answered at all. “The preexisting narratives in this case are going to drive the outcome of this case in some form or fashion in a negative way,” he says. “This political division in our country right now is almost innavigatable. It’s almost to the point where we can’t navigate the split because there’s such strong forces on either side that prevent the objective approach to these cases.”

The Ten-Question Objectivity Check

A ten-step method for assessing any viral video before forming a conclusion. Derived from the Borden–King analysis; applicable to a police shooting, a school board recording, a workplace incident, or a leaked clip of anything.

1.      Notice the feeling and name it. Feel it, label it, set it aside. You cannot set aside a reaction you refuse to admit you are having.

2.      Sort what you actually have. Build two lists: confirmed and contested. In Madison, nearly every decisive fact is on the contested list.

3.      Ask what the camera couldn’t give you. Where was it standing? What is outside the frame? What did the people inside the event perceive that the lens never captured?

4.      Refuse the final frame. Ask what was happening 15 to 17 frames earlier — and what happened in the minutes before that.

5.      Distrust slow motion. If your certainty was built frame by frame, discount it. That is the mode that manufactures the appearance of intent.

6.      Check for hindsight. If your argument contains the words should have, ask whether that decision point looked like a choice at the time, or only looks like one now that you know how it ended.

7.      Audit your vocabulary. Homicide, murder, execution, de-escalation. Are you using them precisely, or because they carry the charge you already feel?

8.      Check the source’s actual access. A title is not information. Has this person seen the file? Would they know if they hadn’t?

9.      Ask what would change your mind. If nothing would, you do not have an assessment. You have a position — and you had it before the video.

10.   Move from think, feel, believe to know, understand, explain.

What is the difference between “think, feel, believe” and “know, understand, explain”?

It is the definitive separation between an emotional reaction and an investigative conclusion, and it is the single line Borden most wants readers to carry.

“Take think, feel, and believe off the list and focus on what you know, understand, and could explain if you were asked to,” he says.

One of these mindsets runs on optics: “Most individuals that are emotionally conducted by a video immediately lean on what they think, feel, and believe based on those optics. That’s called a bad optic generating emotional conductivity. And those are very dangerous components that have to be considered in the overarching investigative process.”

The other runs on evidence. “An investigation provides a platform for us to make or collect data so that we know what happened, we understand what happened, and we can explain what happened.”

What are Borden and King actually asking for?

An informed opinion rather than no opinion. Neither man asks anyone to withhold judgment of their police department. Both ask the opposite.

“I’m not saying don’t have an opinion,” Borden says. “Have an opinion, but make sure your opinions are informed. Make sure you understand both sides of the fence. And it takes time. It’s not going to happen quickly. Because it’s not happening quickly doesn’t mean that it’s defiance against transparency. That time has got to be in place for these investigations to come through to fruition so we can get to the objective reasons that the officers did what they did, why they did what they did, when they did what they did — to make determinations if it was the right thing to do in that scenario.”

King ends where the whole thing started: this is not a spectator question.

“We are citizens and we want the right decisions to be made by law enforcement, by citizens. And this affects all of us at this point. So yeah, if you’re concerned, you should be concerned.”

A man is dead, and that is a tragedy regardless of what the investigation concludes. Officers were injured. A city is grieving and angry, with history that makes the grief and the anger legible. And the truth of what happened across a few seconds at Williamson and Baldwin is currently sitting in evidence that none of us have seen.

“We’re asking you to slow down,” Borden says. “Develop your opinions from an informed point of view, not just a knee jerk reaction.”

Frequently asked questions

Why do police and the public see the same video so differently?

They are not seeing the same thing. The public sees a two-dimensional recording that can be paused, slowed, and replayed indefinitely, from a vantage point no participant occupied. The officer experienced a three-dimensional event once, in real time, with attention narrowed by stress and no ability to review. Trained reviewers treat these as two different data sources requiring reconciliation, not as one source and one lie.

Does a body-worn camera prove what happened?

It provides evidence, not proof of perception. Camera placement, lens angle, dynamic range, frame rate, and the absence of stereoscopic depth all mean footage can capture things an officer did not perceive, and miss things the officer did. A complete investigation reconciles footage with statements, physical evidence, and forensics rather than treating any one of them as decisive.

Is it wrong to have an emotional reaction to a police shooting video?

No. Both analysts are explicit that an emotional response to watching a person die is evidence of normal human functioning. Their argument is that emotion cannot serve as the measurement instrument for reasonableness — feel it, label it, set it aside, then examine the evidence.

How long should a police shooting investigation take?

Weeks to months, and sometimes longer. Borden and King put a basic review of an already-investigated incident at 60 to 100 hours, and cite their own 94-page report covering 2.08 seconds after three weeks of full-time work. A comparable Dane County case took nearly a year. Slowness is not evidence of concealment.

Does “homicide investigation” mean the officer is suspected of murder?

No. Homicide is a manner of death — one person dying at the hands of another — and can be lawful, unlawful, justified, or excusable. The investigation exists to determine which category applies.

Was the shooting of Corey Ruiz justified?

That question is unanswered. Borden and King explicitly decline to reach a conclusion, on the grounds that the evidence deciding it — including whether Ruiz held the knife when shots were fired, the mechanism and severity of the officers’ injuries, and each officer’s account of what they perceived — has not been gathered, disclosed, or tested. They state that a conclusion in either direction is currently unsupported for the same reason.

Key terms defined

About the analysts

Jamie Borden is a retired sergeant from the Henderson (NV) Police Department and the founder of Critical Incident Review, where he teaches force analysis, forensic video review and examination, and investigative decision-making. He spent the final 11 years of his career as a use-of-force subject matter specialist, served nine years as a senior and lead instructor for a major force analysis company, and has handled more than 400 cases as a sergeant and as a retired officer.

Danny King is a 24-year law enforcement veteran, use-of-force expert, and expert witness who has consulted with police departments in the United States and abroad. He spent 18 years as a street-level first responder and six years off the road teaching force and reviewing more than a thousand use-of-force incidents, with 12 to 14 years of training and experience in forensic video analysis.

Together they built and ran their agency’s use-of-force training and analysis unit, reviewing roughly 500 force incidents a year, and designed more than a thousand officer-involved-shooting training scenarios.

Their review of the Madison case reaches no conclusion — by design.