Carlos Dixon, an activist representing the group APTAP — that's "All Power to All People" — walked up to the podium during an official Madison Police Department press conference this week and started ranting about colonialism and Zionism. The police chief stood there. The officers behind him stood there. Nobody moved.

The press conference was theirs. They just didn't want it anymore.

The backdrop here matters. On Wednesday night, Madison police shot and killed Corey Ruiz, a man with an extensive criminal record who had attacked officers with a fixed-blade knife. Ruiz pursued the officers. They responded. That's the story the press conference was supposed to be about.

But Francesca Hong, running to be the next Democrat governor of Wisconsin, showed up at the scene and called the shooting an "execution." Protesters occupied the streets. And by the time the police department scheduled their presser to explain what happened, the mob had already written the narrative.

Then Dixon took the mic. A young woman standing beside him held a sign reading "Corrupt cops deserve to die too!!! F* you kill Peterson." That's the atmosphere the Madison Police Department allowed to set the tone of their own official event. Not challenged. Not removed. Permitted.

Think about what that looks like operationally. You are an officer in Madison, Wisconsin. Your department schedules a press conference to explain why your colleagues were forced to use lethal force against a man who came at them with a knife. And your leadership — the people who are supposed to have your back — let an activist from a group whose motto includes "zero power to Zionists" commandeer the event. You're watching your own chain of command surrender in real time.

APTAP isn't a civil rights organization with policy proposals. Dixon didn't show up to ask tough questions or demand accountability. He showed up to lecture a roomful of cops about imperialism and colonialism, and the cops — the ones with the badges and the building and the podium and the microphone — decided the path of least resistance was silence.

There's a strain of leadership in liberal cities that has decided maintaining order is itself a provocation. That if you just let the disruptor talk, the situation de-escalates. That's the theory, anyway. The practice is that you teach every activist in town that all it takes to own a police press conference is the willingness to walk up and take it.

Madison's cops didn't lose their press conference because they were outnumbered or outgunned. They lost it because someone in the chain of command decided that asserting control over their own event wasn't worth the optics.

When the people paid to keep order won't even keep order at their own podium, the podium was never really theirs.