Movement for Black Lives Issues Statement on Jacob Blake Shooting

After the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Karissa Lewis, National Field Director of Movement for Black Lives, issued the following statement:

“There’s no amount of training or reform that can teach a police officer that it’s wrong to shoot a Black man in the back seven times while his children watch.

“The shooting of Jacob Blake should never have happened. This kind of state-sanctioned violence against Black communities is exactly why defunding the police became a rallying cry for millions of Black people and our allies across the globe during the unprecedented protests in defense of Black life this summer. While our movement has forced important progress across the country, too many police departments continue to be rewarded for deadly behavior with outsized budgets that allow them to operate with impunity.”

About M4BL:

The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) formed in December of 2014, was created as a space for Black organizations across the country to debate and discuss the current political conditions, develop shared assessments of what political interventions were necessary in order to achieve key policy, cultural and political wins, convene organizational leadership in order to debate and co-create a shared movement wide strategy under the fundamental idea that we can achieve more together than we can separately.