Meet The "Outside Agitator" Whose Bronx March Was Violently Cracked Down On By The NYPD

According to the NYPD, the protest in the South Bronx on Thursday was led by violent extremists intent on injuring police officers and destroying the community. Their intent was “to cause mayhem,” Police Commissioner Dermot Shea explained, which justified a premeditated operation to trap, pepper-spray, bludgeon, and arrest marchers en masse at the stroke of curfew.

“This was about tearing down society,” Shea said of the demonstrators on Friday morning. “We had a firearm recovered, gasoline recovered, numerous weapons recovered.”

As he has done since the death of George Floyd first ignited fierce protests against racist police brutality in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio sided with his police boss. “Sometimes there’s more than meets the eye,” the mayor said, dismissing firsthand reports that the group of nonviolent marchers, legal observers and journalists were viciously brutalized on the corner of 136th Street and Brook Avenue without warning or provocation. “I believe the information Commissioner Shea is putting forward is based on fact,” he added.

If the NYPD has facts to back up their account, they haven’t yet shared them. The firearm was recovered by police hours before the protest began, several blocks away, in the car of an individual with no apparent link to the demonstration. Gasoline was not found at the scene, police officials later conceded. A photo shared by the NYPD of items allegedly taken from protesters included a mallet, gloves, a pocket knife, and a flat-changing kit.

The NYPD has also declined to provide evidence for Shea’s assertion that protest leaders were “outside agitators.” Contrary to that claim, the march was led by two veteran Bronx-based activists: Shannon Jones, the co-founder of Bronxites for NYPD Accountability (aka Why Accountability); and Shellyne Rodriguez of Take Back the Bronx.

At exactly 8 p.m. on Thursday, Rodriguez and Jones were arrested, along with more than 250 others, in the NYPD’s most aggressive show of force to date. Both women said the department's targeting of their march stemmed not from credible threats of community destruction, but because of longstanding tensions with the South Bronx organizers and their role in the broader Fuck The Police (#FTP) coalition.

In a phone conversation on Tuesday, Jones, 44, spoke to Gothamist about her violent arrest at the hands of the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, as well as her radical ambitions, and deep apprehensions, for the direction of the current movement. (Disclaimer: This interview features the use of the n-word.)

Commissioner Shea claimed Thursday’s march was being led by “outside agitators” and that the protesters weren’t people who “actually live in the Bronx.” What’s your response to that?

I believe he knows exactly who we are. But he's not speaking to us. He's speaking to the gentrifier, to the white property owner. He's laying the foundation for our messaging and work to be suppressed. There's no way that Dermot Shea and the mayor don't know who I am after six years of speaking at CCRB meetings, ambushing them at Gracie Mansion and City Hall.

It's important to know that the cross section of organizations that make up the FTP formation have a demonstrated body of community work. So we called the action for 6:30 p.m., but we were actually doing a mutual aid food drive before the action. We passed out masks to the community, medical supplies, food, sandwiches, et cetera. We're not outsiders. We know full well that the Hub is home to many marginalized people. We know that it's necessary to continue to support that community. And as we were doing that, we saw the police pulling up and assembling themselves in riot gear along Melrose Avenue at 6:00 p.m.

It was clearly a heavy police presence from the start. There were officers on rooftops, cops in riot gear assembling on every corner. Did that surprise you?

This is our FTP4 — we had 1, 2, 3, so that type of presence was expected. I think it was to send a specific message to the South Bronx community, again, because we have a completely different message from the status quo, Democratic Party run, orchestrated protests that have been happening since the election of Donald Trump.

But this extreme display of militarization we had not seen before. Bronxites for NYPD Accountability was born out of the chokehold of Eric Garner in 2014. We’ve called quite a few protests. We're one of the anchor groups of the #SwipeItForward campaign. We’ve seen riot gear before, batons before. The suits that they wore, we know now that those were the Strategic Response Group officers, but those police were completely unidentifiable. It was completely militaristic. So if you were brutalized in any way, there's no way to specifically identify who it is. They were completely covered from head to toe. And the only thing you could see were their eyes. That's it.

What happened once the march began?

We moved off around 7:15 p.m. Our action went into the public housing developments in the South Bronx, where we had people supporting us, lining up with water and supplies. We stopped at La Morada Restaurant, which is run by an undocumented family that faces plenty of police repression in the community. They're constantly surveilled and harassed. Once we approached 137th Street and Willis Avenue there were the police on bikes forming a line maybe four deep across the Willis Avenue Bridge, which was ridiculous. Why would a Bronx action go into Harlem? That was a misstep on their part.

As we're proceeding down the hill from 136th to Brook Avenue, I look at my phone. It's 7:53 and the first bike lines form in front of us. But it took a second for them to get into formation. So myself and some other folks were able to wiggle around that because they weren’t tight yet. The melee proceeded at precisely 8:00. It was like a Pavlov situation.

I was on the other side of the street being protected by organizers, protesters and people from the Mill Brook community and out of nowhere pops out [NYPD Chief of Department] Terence Monahan. He comes up and gestures to me. I told him, “Yo, don't touch me.” He gives the order to SRG who gave the order to a white shirt who begins to charge at me and put me in a chokehold and flip me face down on the ground.

(Jones’s arrest begins at the 1:00 mark)

And then I was arrested, placed in very tight zip ties and taken to the 40th Precinct. I sat in the pen at the 40th Precinct for about six hours. More and more people kept coming into the pen. Other folks had head injuries that required medical attention. There were about eleven of us in a tiny pen, which is highly dangerous. I was charged with resisting arrest, a solo charge. A note to your readers and listeners: When you're in the pen, don't say a word. Don’t talk.

While you were being arrested on Brook Avenue, there were hundreds of people that were trapped on either side by officers, who fired pepper spray and beat them with batons as they begged to leave. I personally didn’t see anything resembling provocation from protesters. Was there something that caused this?

People were walking. That’s what it was. People walking.

Asked on Tuesday whether he agreed with Shea's characterization of this as "nearly flawlessly executed," the mayor declined to criticize the department, but said an investigation into the arrests would be undertaken. What would you like to see happen next?

I think there should be relentless pressure for Shea and Monahan to resign. I mean, this should be relentless. These ideas of them getting tips and "credible information" and trying to gaslight us by saying we had gasoline and putting propaganda out about obvious construction sites in Gravesend. What kind of integrity is that for the citizens of the city of New York? That's a serious problem.

What happened on Brook Avenue — this is not a 40th Precinct problem, this is not a 48th Precinct problem. The highest level of uniformed police were present on the ground right there. And the very next morning, the mayor feigned ignorance. When your own Chief of Department was there...I could hear people screaming, “I want to go home” as they continued to kettle and pepper spray, beat and brutalize people. That is not the way that you preside over an entire city, by lying to the public. So that’s the first thing that needs to happen: Shea and Monahan must be pressured to resign.

Looking at these protests more broadly, where do you think the movement goes from here?

Bronxites for NYPD Accountability is a Black-led abolitionist organization, so we're predicated on the liberation of African people. We don't speak anything less than that. We’re a reparations organization. We believe in the full restoration of land to the indigenous people that was stolen by European terrorists. Reformism and incremental politics defers our liberation. We don’t speak on the terms of defunding and all of this nonsense. The way New York City operates its agency budgets, I take $600 million from the NYPD and add it to [the Department of Youth and Community Development], get up on TV and say we added $600 million to DYCD, but that’s to fund the police program. Come on, people. We have to be smarter.

As someone who’s spent years doing this work, how does it feel to watch this mass movement suddenly catch fire in the streets? You don’t think New Yorkers are being radicalized to the cause you’ve long devoted yourself to?

Yes and no. I think people are incensed, but not necessarily radicalized. I was incensed in 2014, but didn’t have the proper Black political education to be radicalized the way I am now. What’s happening with George Floyd is literally a mirror to Eric Garner. People are incensed, but white supremacy is very crafty. You see the way you were kettled, right? There's also the kettling of a radical movement and turning it into something else that's more palatable. It's a matter of: Can radical education reach people in order to give them what they need to be clear about who their enemy is and how the enemy functions in this society?

White supremacy has no business dictating what our righteous anger looks like. You see all these white folks are kneeling down. Congress is wearing kente cloth. Really? Who says to them, "I think we should do this"? This is what lets you know that the African person in this country is still not viewed as human. Congress doesn't even have the wherewithal to say, "These niggas are going to interpret this as pandering, maybe we shouldn't do that." They're confident that we'll interpret this as relief.

De Blasio has laid some of the blame for the protests on President Trump. You were very critical of the Democratic leaders in the rally ahead of the march. What would you say to those hopeful things will go back to normal if Trump is removed from office?

White people want to go back to subtle racism. Remember that racism isn't limited to calling you a nigga in the store. It contains red-lining, employment discrimination, different interest rates based on your zip code. There are all of these components that create a racist society. Folks are more comfortable with the more covert manifestations of that racism than Trump's more overt version. What happened on Thursday night happened under de Blasio, a Democrat, and Governor Cuomo, a Democrat. Eric Garner was murdered with a Democrat mayor, a Democrat governor, and a Democrat president. So what does Trump have to do with Black people? That's the binary that white people set up to keep us entranced in their system. Our situation is way more nuanced than that. We're not doing this garbage anymore with “vote blue all the way down” or "Jim Crow Joe Biden." Nobody is falling for that anymore.

What’s your alternative?

What needs to happen is Black people need to coalesce among themselves without the interjection of white saviorism. We have a principle of unity that governs our formation. One of the main things I can encourage Black people to do is to form your own organized body that does not contain white saviorism.

We're building on the shoulders of giants. When Sean Bell was murdered, mothers pulled together and formed an organization called Beware. We're building off the Black Panther Party, we're building off Beware, we're building off all these individuals with a revolutionary mindset.

I want to make sure that it's not about me. We need people politically educated enough to know what it is. Don't wait for Miss Jones to do something because you'll be oppressed in the meantime.

For those curious, what does Miss Jones do when she’s not organizing against police brutality?

You wanna hear the gag? I work for the City of New York. Ha! I call the mayor a "bozo" and he signs my paycheck. I work for social services — we'll leave it at that.

These are conundrums and contradictions that we have to confront when we do this work. One of the chief ways we've been able to escape the cycle of poverty is taking employment through the oppressive apparatus. That's why you have a lot of Black people who are cops, work for social services, work for NYCHA. But if you look at any city agency, the top levels of city agencies are white people.

When did you get involved in abolition organizing — and what do you think has changed since then?

We formed after Eric Garner. It was similar to what you see now with George Floyd. We were going to protests three to four nights a week, especially after the grand jury.

As background, I’d attended A. Philip Randolph High School in Harlem. We had all of these expressions of Black culture and Black radicalism when I was a young teen. Those things were embedded in the back of my mind. So during the Garner protests, we go to this thing at Barclays. Remember when everyone was doing die-ins? It's December. I'm laying on the ground on Atlantic Avenue. I could feel the cold from the pavement going up my ass. That's when the light bulb went off. Laying on the pavement in the middle of Atlantic Avenue surrounded by a racist police force that wants to oppress us. Nope. It didn't add up.

That's when I started looking into who is who, who are these organizations, what are they calling for. What are they predicated on? What is our organization predicated on? What is justice, what is equality, what does it mean in real time? What does it look like? I had to start questioning all of that.

You think organizers who call for protesters to kneel or lie down are hurting the cause?

I'll put it this way: Whoever's got you marching with politicians and kneeling down, why are you kneeling in 2020? Whoever has you kneeling, hugging cops — ugh. They may talk a good motivational speech game about Black people this, Black people that, but then there's the bait and switch back to special prosecutors, legislation, and police reform. Any organizer who says anything like that is gaming you. There's a race in the Democratic party for who can be the misleader to round up the most niggers — yeah I said it. This is why [Public Advocate] Jumaane Williams has his own separate protests, it's why the lawyers have their own separate protests. They're trying to provide a different tactic than 2014 when it was 75,000 marching [down] 14th Street.

What happened after that? Remember that Saturday. It was December 13th, 2014, when 75,000 marched on 14th Street. By February of 2015 when NYC Shut It Down started their protest in Grand Central, six weeks later, you couldn't get 600 people out. What happened to those organizers? What work did they do to radicalize those people? Nothing. That's the point.

What happened on Brook Avenue is a metaphor for the United States. It's about kettling the anger to do the bait and switch. Now Mr. Floyd is buried, so as far as white people are concerned, they're kneeling. "Please don't destroy the front facing business corporations that give us campaign donations. We'll even put on kente cloth, please.” I would like people to build off what we already learned. Why should you be doing a kneel or a sit-in in 2020? We're trying to build scaffolds, not be in a perpetual Groundhog Day that defers Black liberation and maintains white supremacy.

This interview has been edited and condensed.