A Madison police officer shot and killed a man on Wednesday after a street encounter near the state Capitol turned into a knife struggle, ending with three gunshots and a hospital death. Police did not name the man, who was in his 30s, as the Wisconsin Department of Criminal Investigation took over the case.
Police Chief John Patterson said officers were responding to calls that someone was trying to enter parked vehicles when the suspect fled on a bike through nearby backyards and was later contacted in the street. Patterson said the man fell off the bike, or was taken off it, during the struggle, pulled out a knife, injured one officer and forced a taser attempt that failed before the same officer fired his weapon.
That sequence mattered because the shooting unfolded in a busy Madison neighborhood less than two miles from the state Capitol, where restaurants, bars, shops and homes sit close together and where people quickly saw cellphone video of the encounter circulate online. The video captured only one perspective, but it was enough to draw a crowd and send the city back to a street already tied to a previous police killing.
That earlier case is part of why the reaction turned sharp. A white police officer shot and killed Tony Robinson on the same street in 2015, and a district attorney later decided the officer was justified and filed no charges. In this shooting, advocates for the Black community in Madison said the man killed on Wednesday was Black, and Brandi Grayson said the city watched him die before knowing his name.
Grayson called the killing the cruelty of state violence, a line that landed because the basic facts remained unresolved in public view even as police gave their account. Chief Patterson offered condolences to the family and said the officer was injured by the knife during the struggle, but the name of the dead man was still withheld, leaving the investigation to determine what happened in the brief, violent moments before the shots were fired.
