STATEMENT FROM URBAN TRIAGE CEO BRANDI GRAYSON
On the Police Killing of a Black Man on Williamson Street
July 22, 2026

Today, Madison police shot a Black man three times at close range while he was experiencing a mental health crisis. Video circulating throughout our community shows him lying dead in the street. Officers then handcuffed him and piled onto his body.

We do not yet know his name. Sit with that.

Another Black man is dead on a Madison street, and our community watched him die before we even knew his name. That is the cruelty of state violence. It takes a person’s life, strips away his humanity, and turns his final moments into a video before his family has the dignity of grieving him as a whole human being.

To his family, to everyone who loved him, and to everyone who knew him before today, his life has been reduced to a hashtag: we see you. We grieve with you. We will not look away, and we will not allow his killing to become background noise.

This happened on Williamson Street, the same street where Madison police killed Tony Robinson, an unarmed 19-year-old Black teenager, in 2015.

Eleven years later. Same street. Same white supremacist system. Another Black person in crisis met with bullets instead of care.

And this happened only seven months after Madison’s own Independent Police Monitor found that Richard Lee Johnson, a 32-year-old Black man, died from restraint-related cardiac arrest after officers pinned him to the ground, ignored his cries that he could not breathe, and failed to get him medical care.

The medical examiner called Richard’s death an overdose. An independent forensic pathologist called it what it was: officers killed him.

Still, no charges. Still, officers cleared. Still, a police chief is more committed to defending his department than confronting the Black bodies left behind by it.

These are not isolated incidents. This is not a training problem, a communication problem, or a handful of bad decisions. This is white supremacy operating exactly as it was designed to operate.

It is a system that sees Black pain as a threat. Black mental illness as danger. Black addiction as criminality. Black poverty as failure. Black fear as aggression. It meets our most vulnerable moments with force instead of care, then writes its own reports, investigates itself, clears itself, and demands that we accept its version of how our people died.

And when one office begins challenging that machinery, the system turns on the office.

The Office of the Independent Police Monitor, one of the only mechanisms our community has to challenge police power, has spent this year being second-guessed, undermined, and targeted by the same institutions it was created to hold accountable. That is not a coincidence. That is what white supremacy does when accountability begins to work. It attacks the accountability.

We owe our community honesty: we do not have a perfectly organized call to action today. Normally, we would. Today, we are angry. We are heartbroken. And we are exhausted.

We are grieving a man whose name we do not know, on top of Richard Lee Johnson, on top of Tony Robinson, on top of every Black person this city has buried, blamed, criminalized, and explained away.

If you are exhausted, too, that is not a weakness. That exhaustion is part of the violence. These systems are counting on us becoming so tired of watching Black people die that we eventually stop watching, stop demanding answers, and stop fighting.

We refuse.

Urban Triage will process this with our team and community in the coming days. Today, we are a direct-service organization providing housing, agriculture, outreach, and education. But we were born from organizing against state violence and police brutality. Our work has grown, but our roots have not changed. This is still who we are.

We will show up. We do not yet know every form that showing up will take, and we will not manufacture an answer for the sake of appearing prepared. But we will be there.

Freedom Inc., our sister organization and fellow Black-led institution, is calling our community to gather at Williamson and Baldwin streets, where this man was killed. Urban Triage stands fully behind that call. Follow Freedom Inc. directly for the time and details. Show up.

We demand:

  • The immediate public release of all dash-camera footage from today’s shooting
  • An independent investigation by the Office of the Independent Police Monitor, not an internal MPD review
  • Full transparency regarding this man’s identity, the circumstances of his mental health crisis, and the complete use-of-force timeline
  • Protection of the Independent Police Monitor’s office and contract from political interference by agencies seeking to weaken police oversight
  • The reopening of Richard Lee Johnson’s case for criminal review, consistent with the Independent Monitor’s findings

Rest in power to the man whose name we do not yet know.

You deserved care. You deserved humanity. You deserved to live.

Brandi Grayson
Founder and CEO
Urban Triage