200 in Pacoima Protest Daily News Story

More than 200 angry community leaders and residents of Pacoima rallied Friday to protest a Daily News article they said depicted their community and schools as infested with crime and drug-ridden.

The article, published Sunday on the front page of the newspaper, relates the story of a Westlake Village man who recently became the legal guardian of four teen-age athletes from Pacoima. The story said the young football and track stars moved in with Buzz Holcomb’s family to “escape the crime and gangs of their Pacoima neighborhood.” It was accompanied by photographs of abandoned cars and graffiti-scarred homes.

The residents, many of whom came from the largely black, middle-class section of Pacoima known as Hansen Hills, gathered at Pacoima Community Youth Cultural Center on Glenoaks Boulevard.

Jose De Sosa, state president of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, told the group the article was “typically one-sided” and unfair because it failed to report community anti-drug campaigns and other positive aspects of Pacoima. De Sosa, a resident of Pacoima, and others urged residents to boycott the newspaper, whose main offices are in Woodland Hills, and write letters of protest to the editor.

Daily News Editor Bob Burdick, in an interview after the rally, defended the paper’s coverage of Pacoima and said the story was fair and balanced. The teen-agers and their families “had a story to tell, and we told it accurately and in context, as we always do,” he said.

One of the protesters, Dolores Contreraz, a resident of Pacoima for 62 years, said she has reared seven children and 12 grandchildren, all of whom are hard-working and drug-free.