Jaguars' DJ Chark, Chris Conley Address Shooting of Jacob Blake and Racial Injustice: 'I Just Want Answers'

*attached video is from June 5*

Much like the rest of the United States, emotions were high in Jacksonville on Thursday. Players and coaches were sad, frustrated, angry, confused and much, much more.

The Jaguars, who were originally scheduled to practice at 9:45 a.m., instead met as a team for several hours to discuss the shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who was shot seven times by police in Kenosha, Wis., along with the pattern of racial injustice throughout the country.

The Jaguars would eventually hit the practice field but it felt not nearly as important as what was happening outside of the practice facility or as important as what would be discussed once the team was off of the field.

Once practice concluded, Jaguars receivers DJ Chark and Chris Conley addressed the shooting of Blake, the decision to continue with practice on Thursday, the next steps to take, and more.

"Today is the first day that I saw the video. And for me personally, I can’t speak for everyone, but it gets to the point to where I feel like I’ve—you see one, you’ve seen them all, because it’s always the same situation," Chark said during a video press conference on Thursday.

"And we stand up and it happens again and again. And today, I commend Coach [Marrone] for bringing this to our attention this morning. And he gave us the whole morning, we all talked about it, we got a lot of frustration off of our chests, we looked for answers we—and we still have more. We still have more talking to do, it’s definitely not close to being over."

The shooting of Blake comes just months following the death of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement officers in Minneapolis in May. The Jaguars held peaceful demonstrations and promoted change, racial equality and an end to police brutality and systemic oppression, but a few months later, its players, and countless others throughout the nation and world, once again had to grapple with the fact that a Black person was gunned down in America.

"Quite frankly, if I’m honest, I don’t know exactly how I feel right now. There’s a sense of sadness but at the same time, when something happens a lot, you can grow numb to it," Conley said Thursday.

"And that’s not a place that I, or anyone else in this building want to be in. And quite frankly, we’ve had conversations time and time again of what can we do that’s actionable. And we’ve come up with ideas. But ultimately, the thing that we have all agreed on is that we can’t stop pressing until things happen. It’s not something that will happen overnight, but we can’t allow ourselves to let life happen and us to forget."

"Obviously, we always mourn the loss of life and that’s the thing that I really want people to get to a point of realizing that this is about life. This isn’t about priors, this isn’t about, ‘Did he do this? Did he do that? Was he armed? Or did he not do this? Or that?’ This is about a life," Conley would later say.

"And who are you to put a value on a life? Who am I to put a value on a life? And if we can—we need to get to that baseline of saying that a life matters. And that it has value beyond what his warrant was, beyond what his circumstances were, what he looked like, what was going on, whether he listened or not. And that’s the baseline that I want to get to people, that frustrates me more. The people arguing that he deserved it, the people arguing that he should’ve done this, he should’ve done that. He shouldn’t have died. He shouldn’t have died.”

Ever since the death of Floyd, the Jaguars as a team have continued to promote social change at home in Jacksonville. But those talks are for more down the road, in the long-term future. For change to occur now, when it is needed the most, Conley knows action now is also required.

"Part of our talk this morning was about what we can do right now. We’ve talked a lot as a team, and we’ve put some things into motion of long-term goals and plans that we have here in the city of Jacksonville," Conley said.

"But quite frankly, those are long-term goals and plans. But this morning, we talked about some actionable things that we as a locker room can do now, conversations that we can have now. And that’s really where our meeting this morning took a turn, was let’s look at what we can do here right now. We might not be able to affect the whole world, but we can do something here, where we’re at.”

The decision by the Jaguars roster to practice was not a consensus one, but it was one decided by the players only.

Chark said that Marrone gave the team the decision as players to practice or not. If they decided not to practice, Marrone would understand and support them, Chark said. The players then took it into their own hands.

The majority of the team (73 members of the team's roster, to be exact) would then meet collectively to discuss practice. As Chark described it, the team agreed with one another to let it come to a vote and then to stand in unity behind that vote, regardless of one's own voting decision.

"And we went to the locker room, players only, and we talked about it, we all had our differences. And whether you were on the side of practicing or whether you were on the side of not practicing, we came to an agreement that we would make a vote and whatever side is the side then we [were] all going to respect that and we were going to respect that decision as a team, we were going to do it," Chark said.

"It was a really, really, really close vote, I’m not going to say who was on what side, but we decided that as a team, we’re not going to let 5 or 10 people go out there and practice. We’re going to practice together and that’s what we did. And I think as a team, we took a big step today. And by practicing, by no means are we not being aware of the situation, we are deeply saddened by the situation and we’re going to take the rest of this day to continue to talk about it.”

The vote came down to a razor-thin margin: 37-36, with the final vote meaning the team would practice on Thursday before continuing conversations and dialogue about immediate actions to take to promote change in the nation.

"Today, the building and the locker room was somewhat of a microcosm of what’s been going on in this country for weeks and months. But the outcome could be taken in multiple ways," Conley said Thursday.

"You could take it in a way to say, ‘Oh they weren’t united, they were split.’ The vote on whether to practice or not, or really just to continue the conversation, came down to one vote: 36-37. And you can look at that as a negative, or you can look at the fact that the discourse was happening and the disagreement was happening, but people decided to band together and stick together. And see the positives in that, you could look at the people who don’t have the same experience or background as other people in the locker room, and you say, ‘Hey, I want to sit down with you and talk and come to a better understanding of what it is that makes you feel so strongly.’ That’s a positive."

Other sports leagues across the United States have postponed entire games in recent days, with the NBA postponing two days worth of playoff games after the Milwaukee Bucks took a stand and opted not to play against the Orlando Magic on Wednesday.

MLS, the WNBA and other sports have followed. Several NFL practices were canceled. But what if another tragedy happens in the following weeks or months, and the NFL is faced with the same question of whether or not to play that these other leagues were faced with this week?

“I’m not concerned, honestly speaking, if that’s the situation, I respect it. If that’s what’s going to get us answers, I respect it, I just want answers," Chark said when asked about that hypothetical on Thursday.

"Obviously, this is the way I live, [the way] I earn my livelihood. But if this is the way to come to a conclusion and the answer to stop all of this police brutality, I’d do it in a heartbeat. This personally affects me because I’ve been seeing this since I was a kid. I’ve seen instances where a man in Winnfield, Louisiana –where my mom is from, I forgot how old I was— got tased while he was in handcuffs, tased multiple times, died. It made CNN, we had celebrities come march, and they pushed the dates back of the trial. Eventually the [police officer] got off and we never heard of it again. So, if now a situation like this happens and the NFL [were to] say we’ll stop, or the leaders were to interfere and say, ‘We’re going to stop football until we get answers.’ 100 percent we’re getting answers.”

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