Los Angeles -
A police shooting in Los Angeles' notorious homeless district inflames tensions between those who enforce the law and the homeless.
“You'd never think you'd see this in America, would you?” said a smiling man, who was sitting in a doorway in downtown Los Angeles' Skid Row.
He gestured to grimy tents, crumpled tarps and shopping carts crowding the sidewalks into a narrow shantytown.
Among them, dozens of ragged men and women sprawled, meandered or stared at the ground.
A man with a long white beard slumped on a kerb.
A woman, barefoot and naked from the waist down, pushed a cart unsteadily down the street.
“I never saw this before I came to Los Angeles,” the man said.
Asked for his name, he shook his head. “No one has a name on Skid Row.”
An estimated 58 000 people are homeless in Los Angeles County.
As many as 3 000 of them live in this approximately 50 square blocks of downtown, just a few streets from city hall in the United States' second-largest city.
More than a century ago, the neighbourhood was at the end of the line of Los Angeles' railroad, a transient place where people stayed when they didn't have anywhere else to go.
Over the generations, it has become one of the largest stable populations of homeless people in the country, and a neighbourhood consumed by drug addiction, mental illness and the crime and desperation borne of life on the street.
On Sunday, police responding to a robbery call shot and killed a homeless man known as Africa at his tent here.
A video filmed by a witness showed a violent struggle involving at least six officers.
Police said three of them fired at the man after he reached for an officer's gun, an account witnesses dispute.
Police records show that Africa was a convicted bank robber with a California warrant out for his arrest.
Documents initially identifying him as a 39-year-old Frenchman were stolen 15 years ago, the French consul general in Los Angeles told the Los Angeles Times - and so his true identity, like many here, may never be known.
The shooting has renewed protests against and anger at the Los Angeles Police Department, amid nationwide outrage about police use of force and the deaths of unarmed black men at police hands.
Demonstrators marched on Los Angeles Police Department headquarters Tuesday, carrying signs that referenced the August 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the Los Angeles police beating of Rodney King in March 1991.
“They are always harassing people. They ask black people, 'Are you on parole or are you on probation?' And then they start messing with you,” a homeless Skid Row resident who called himself General TC Alexander told dpa outside LAPD headquarters.
“It's a crime being black here in LA,” he said.
But social service providers on Skid Row said that while police brutality and discrimination are real concerns in the US, the tension on Skid Row isn't between black and white, but between laws with no place for the homeless and homeless with no place to go.
Police try to enforce laws prohibiting people from living on the street, and homeless are “backed into a corner,” said Ryan Navales, public relations director for Midnight Mission, Skid Row's oldest social service provider.
“You add in mental illness and addiction, and it becomes us and them,” he said. “It's an untenable situation.”
Two days after the shooting, the neighbourhood was no closer to a solution.
Africa's tent was gone, replaced by a makeshift memorial: a cross of white roses and an empty bottle of wine.
Handwritten posters tied to a tree expressed condolences, and hope for a solution to homelessness and “a broken system.”
Just a few feet away, 32-year Skid Row resident Ceola Waddell, 58, sat in an armchair on the sidewalk, nattily dressed in brown pyjamas and tending a tiny pushcart hot dog stand.
The neighbourhood's beat policeman stopped by and told him that without a permit the stand would have to go.
“I'm enforcing the law,” the police officer said.
“You ain't obeying no law,” said Waddell.
“That's all he does, harass the homeless. That's all he does.”
Sapa-dpa