Police convictions aren't equivalent to justice, family members of police brutality victims say. They want reparations to make up for generations of institutionalized racism.

• A jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of murder and manslaughter in the case of George Floyd's death.
• For activists his conviction was just a step toward justice - broader reparations are still needed.
• Reparations aren't new. Local governments have paid Black Americans to offset the impact of systemic injustice.

When a jury decided that Derek Chauvin was guilty of murder and manslaughter in George Floyd's death, protesters cheered and cried across Minnesota.

But organizers and family members of victims of police violence are careful not to label his conviction as anything more than a step in the direction toward justice. They say Black communities - in and around Minnesota - need reparations to begin to make up for generations of state violence and systemic injustice.

Trahern Crews, a spokesperson with Black Lives Matter Minnesota, told Insider the organization is leading the charge for reparations to Black residents in the state.

"It's about direct cash payments," he said. "Reparations is cause for a cessation, which means stop killing them, or stop harming them."

"That's not stopping, so we don't get a chance to heal," Crews added.

Even so, financial reparations aren't enough to make up for the damage done.

It's important that Black communities in Minnesota and elsewhere see convictions when police brutality occurs, Crews said.

Chauvin's guilty conviction gave protesters in Minneapolis a brief moment of respite, Floyd's family members and activists on the ground said. But convictions represent just one aspect of reparations.

"There's going to be change in the future, and we still have a lot of reparations to make from the past so cases need to be re-opened and we need to re-examine them," said Floyd's girlfriend, Courteney Ross.

"This is what justice feels like: gut-wrenching relief, exhaustion. It's not sweet or satisfying. It's necessary, important, maybe even historic," Philonise Floyd, brother to George Floyd, wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. "But only with the passage of time will we know if the guilty verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin is the start of something that will truly change America and the experience of Black Americans."

Chauvin's conviction was unique because it was the first time in Minnesota that a white officer was found guilty for killing a Black man. There was only ever one other conviction for an officer in the state of Minnesota - and it was a Black immigrant officer convicted in the death of a white woman.

The case, experts say, is just one example that points to the broad power mostly-white police forces have over the communities over color they're expected to serve.

"Despite bringing a slight sense of justice, this verdict pertains to only one case," Damon Hewitt, acting president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a statement. "It does not solve the systemic problem of racially discriminatory policing and lack of police accountability."

Other officers were never convicted

The Minnesota officer who shot and killed Philando Castile, Jeronimo Yanez, was acquitted on all counts in 2017.

Police officers, in fact, are rarely ever convicted for fatal shootings. Less than 2% of all fatal shootings at the hands of police have so far resulted in a conviction.

But convictions are one way to show that Black lives matter, activists told Insider.

Beyond convictions for the officers who shot and killed Floyd and Wright, Castile's girlfriend Diamond Reynolds said she wants more support from her community.

"I need 40 acres and a mule, really," she said. "Because I feel like Minnesota took away so much from my growing. They took away so much from me being able to sustain myself. Minnesota took away my livelihood."

Reynolds and her daughter, Dae'Anna, witnessed Yanez shoot Castile seven times in his car. She live-streamed the aftermath of the fatal shooting. Police later detained her and questioned her about the incident. Reynolds an $800,000 settlement from two Minnesota cities for enduring emotional distress and false arrest.

The trauma of both Castile's death and her arrest still weigh on her.

"It's so hard for me to get housing, jobs, resources, just any type of support that I need," she continued. "I'm a single mother raising two children. I don't have a lot of family at all in Minnesota. And it's just that this state really put me in the limelight, and it's not in a way that I would have wanted to be remembered as."

It's a systemic issue that constantly pits Black Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder, he said. Economic inequality and poverty exacerbate the trauma because Black Americans have a hard time escaping it.

"It costs a certain amount of money to be American," he said. "And I think it costs a certain amount of money to get justice in America, too. So that trauma looks like the Black woman in Boston is worth $8. The middle-class Black family in Los Angeles is worth $200. The median income in Minnesota for black families is $17,000. That's traumatizing."