“We refuse to let anyone come to Englewood and tear it up,” said activist Charles McKenzie as he forcefully ejected a bunch of Black Lives Matter protesters from his neighborhood.
“If you ain’t from Englewood, get the F*** out of here,” longtime neighborhood resident Darryl Smith confirmed to the stunned protesters. After some pushing and yelling they left and went to harass other people and left them alone.
From Fox32: After some tense moments in Englewood, a standoff between residents and protesters has ended peacefully. A protest Tuesday started over a Chicago police-involved shooting and ended when Englewood residents pushed back. Expletives were dropped, and there was pushing and shoving, which forced the protesters to retreat.
A caravan started on 64th and Cottage Grove, and the protesters eventually ended up in front of the 7th District police station, but it didn’t last long.
Several activist groups had organized a march leading to the 7th police precinct in Englewood. However, an organizer later told Fox 32 that groups decided to leave after confrontations with nearby residents left them feeling “unsafe.”
“If you ain’t from Englewood, get the f*** out of here!” resident Darryl Smith shouted at the protesters. Residents engaged in pushing matches with some of the protesters.
“They were…gonna come to Englewood, antagonizing our police, and then when they go back home to the North Side in Indiana, our police are bitter and they’re beating up our little black boys,” Smith told Fox. Charles McKenzie, of a community violence-prevention group called God’s Gorillas, concurred, saying “We refuse to let anyone come to Englewood and tear it up.”
Protesters maintained that they had come to demonstrate peacefully in favor of defunding the police. Organizers from one of the protest groups, GoodKids MadCity, said that they were themselves residents of Englewood, but that others in the neighborhood did not support eliminating the police entirely.
Englewood has long been plagued by gun violence, including this year as Chicago sees a spike in shootings and homicides. Chicago police recorded 440 homicides and 2,240 shooting victims in the first seven months of 2020, up from 290 homicides and 1,480 shooting victims the previous year
