We Can’t Be Shocked by Those Who Enact Vigilante Justice in Our Name

In the coming days a lot will be said and written about Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the 28 year old who drove from Baltimore to New York in order to exact his own distorted version of vigilante justice on New York City police before taking his own life. His criminal history was paraded across news sites mere hours after the incident. His mental health has already begun to be scrutinized. Once she recovers from her gunshot wounds, Brinsley’s ex-girlfriend will certainly face rounds of questions about everything from his political views to the people he associated with. Soon enough family and friends will be implicated as well. But at this moment, with everything still so fresh and uncertain, I find myself fixated on an image of Brinsley alone in a car on the New Jersey Turnpike.

For the past 21 years, I-95 and the New Jersey Turnpike have been fixtures in my life. At 18, I left D.C. for Rutgers University and again at 26 for New York City. Even during my law school years at George Washington, I managed to find my way back up north at least four times a year. All of which is to say that I know with near certainty that, in addition to being the most expensive corridor in the United States, it’s also one long, dreary drive. The Delaware Bridge notwithstanding, the journey is virtually flat and straight. And aside from the Mylard Tydings Bridge spanning the Susquehanna River in Havre de Grace, its landscapes are utterly devoid of the grandeur and scope that typifies so many American roadways.

I point this out because the drive between Maryland and New York never seems to gets any shorter or any easier. If it’s not a toll line, it’s a traffic backup. If it’s not traffic, then it’s the miles and miles between Turnpike exits when every decent radio station has faded out of range and the inescapable Turnpike stench has settled in for the duration. What the drive lacks in external stimulation (the odor notwithstanding), it makes up for in the time it affords for internal reflection.

In my mind’s eye, I picture Brinsley carrying a loaded gun he’s already used once that day under his seat. He’s also still carrying the phone he used to post a veiled warning of his intentions on his Instagram account, the same phone that police will later trace to Brooklyn. Yet, despite both what he’s done and is about to do, he’s able to remain under the radar for the duration of the three-plus-hour drive from Baltimore to Brooklyn. He pays his tolls (presumably). He sits in traffic (likely). He stops for gas and/or to use a bathroom (quite possibly). Through it all, he avoids detection. He moves through the northeast corridor as if he’s just like everyone else on their way to visit family and friends for the holidays. Either that or or no one seems to notice anything peculiar about him. And then, after making a series of seemingly calculated choices over several hours, he randomly targets a pair of officers—officers of color I might add (since few others have)—to murder.

If police were the target, why drive all the way to New York? If New York cops were the target, then why Brooklyn and not Staten Island, where Garner was actually killed?
Indeed, what makes Saturday’s shooting so unsettling is that it was carried out with a combination of recklessness and premeditation, madness and mission. In as much as the shooter acted alone (as far as we know), he did so in the name of a group and for a cause that he identified with: “They took 1 of ours…Let’s take 2 of theirs,” he wrote on his Instagram page where he also repeatedly referred to the police as “pigs” and, for all intents and purposes, presaged his own martyrdom. The question I am left with is with whom, exactly, he identified? While it’s clear who he saw as his enemy, it’s not so clear who saw as his allies. Which brings me back to the New Jersey Turnpike.

This past week President Obama announced the United States and Cuba were reestablishing diplomatic ties. Hot on the heels of his announcement, the New Jersey State police renewed calls for Assata Shakur’s extradition from Cuba. A member of the Black Panther Party (the group credited with popularizing the term “pig” in the 1960s) and its militant wing, the Black Liberation Army, Shakur was given life in prison for the 1973 killing of a state trooper during a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike. She later escaped from prison before fleeing to Cuba where Fidel Castro’s government has granted her asylum for the past 35 years. Just last year she became the first woman on the FBI’s 10 most wanted terrorists list. The FBI and the New Jersey Attorney General have pledged a combined $2 million reward for assistance leading to her capture.

Assata Shakur is, for many, the last living vestige from the Black Power era and the mythical embodiment of “a 20th Century escaped slave,” a title she bestowed upon herself. She has been admired by at least three generations of young activists, including those in Ferguson, as a righteous freedom fighter who is at once unjustly persecuted and unafraid of challenging power. That this—the slaughter of two innocent cops and a call for her extradition—has all happened in the same week may just be coincidence. I have no reason to think otherwise.

But one thing that is certain is that as this modern protest movement settles in for the long term, we should once again prepare for it to mutate and evolve as time passes. What it was yesterday may not be what it is tomorrow. Not everyone will be satisfied with die-ins and marches, legislation, or the democratic process. In the middle and late 1960s, the civil rights movement splintered into several mini-movements. Likewise, even if Brinsley is a total anomaly (and let’s assume he is), we should not be shocked if and when the resistance movement evolves this go round, or that we who support resistance struggle find ourselves at odds with those who enact vigilante justice in our name.