Leadership Reports

A Message From LeyVa's Social Justice Committee:

For week's Social Justice topic, we'll be touching base on the topic of police brutality. As many of you may know the Black Lives Matter movement, also known as BLM, has been a much talked about topic for months now ever since the day George Floyd was wrongly killed by police. That was an example of police brutality, but his case, sadly, is one of many.

The term "police brutality" is sometimes used to refer to various human rights violations by police. This might include beatings, racial abuse, unlawful killings, torture, or indiscriminate use of riot control agents at protests. The BLM movement is not only a movement to stop police brutality against black people, but its mission is also to spread awareness about unlawful violence against all people by police.

The name Black Lives Matter was chosen for the movement because it is disproportionately black people being affected by police brutality, and their cases rarely result with justice for the victims or their families. This has a lot to do with systemic racism which is a reference to the systems in place that create and maintain racial inequality in nearly every facet of life for people of color. Even though George Floyd's family could possibly get justice due to all the attention that case received over the summer, we still have a long way to go.

For more information about Black Lives Matter and on police brutality in America, you can check out the Instagram account @blklivesmatter or go to https://www.tolerance.org/topics Remember we are writing the history of the future, will you be on the right side of it?

Fast Facts:

• More than 1,000 unarmed people died as a result of police harm between 2013 and 2019, according to data from Mapping Police Violence. About a third of them were black.
• About 17% of the black people who died as a result of police harm were unarmed (did not have a weopon on them), a larger share than any other racial group and about 1.3 times more than the average of 13%.
• A black man in the U.S. has an estimated 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police during his lifetime, according to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That's 2.5 times the odds for a non-Hispanic white man.

The LeyVa SJC is comprised of: Jemimah, Lara, Virginia, Julia, Sarah, & Jennifer