Slaying by LAPD Becomes Rallying Point : Police: Imperial Courts tenants use Henry Peco’s death to vent frustrations about life at the housing project. They seek an independent investigation, but officials call the shooting justified.

On the fiercely windy Friday evening after Thanksgiving, police responded to reports of gunfire at the Imperial Courts housing project moments after it was plunged into darkness by a power blackout.

They were confronted by three gunmen who opened fire from a dark courtyard in the heart of the sprawling cinder-block project on Imperial Highway in South Los Angeles, officers said.

Amid the roar of gunfire, Henry Peco was shot by police five times, once between the eyes. He died in a children’s sandbox, surrounded by dozens of screaming, angry and frightened housing project tenants.

In the weeks since the shooting, an outcry has risen as some community leaders and residents have turned the episode into a symbol of their distrust of police and into a forum for venting frustrations about life in a place they say has been all but abandoned by the city.

“The way we feel right now is that the police can’t be trusted,” said tenant Perry Crouch, who organized a group called the Henry Peco Justice Committee. “They talk to us with their guns cocked, like we are bad just because we live here.

“What we’re talking about here is a new beginning,” Crouch said. “I’m not marching for Henry; I’m marching to make sure no other brother is shot senselessly.”

In the new political climate that has taken hold in the wake of the police beating of Rodney G. King, police actions can become a lightning rod for political activism and maneuvering, particularly in poor communities that feel forgotten by mainstream society, said James R. Lasley, professor of criminal justice at Cal State Fullerton.

“It’s become a modern form of rebellion,” Lasley said. “It’s the ‘90s way of retaliating against police.”

The tenants group has called for an independent investigation of the shooting and for meetings with top city officials and police authorities aimed at easing tensions in a community of 1,400 mostly poor black and Latino tenants that Police Chief Daryl F. Gates has described as a tinderbox.

The controversy has surprised police and county prosecutors who view the shooting as clear-cut and justified. “This is about as justified a shooting as can be,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Daniel A. Lenhart, who is in charge of a unit that handles crimes against police officers.

Although authorities say they have confessions from two gunmen implicating Peco, his relatives insist that the 28-year-old man they knew as “Tiny” did not shoot at the officers. They say he was unarmed and was gunned down without provocation while trying to guide children home in the dark.

LaShaune Holmes, a cousin, said Peco had escorted three youngsters to her apartment from a nearby gymnasium and was on his way back to help two more when he walked into cross-fire between gunmen and police.

She said she was waiting for him to return when she heard the shots and screams of “Tiny’s been hit!” She said she made her way to the body and began pressing on Peco’s chest, yelling: “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” when two officers pulled her away and handcuffed her. Holmes said she was taken into custody and questioned about whether she had removed evidence. She told police she took nothing and was released without being charged.

Lt. William Hall, who is investigating the shooting for the Police Department, said police have not been able to find anyone who saw either the shooting or the events that precipitated it. “We didn’t find anyone who saw the shooting,” Hall said, “other than the participants.”

However, Crouch of the justice committee said he knew of “five or six people who saw it. But they are not saying nothing until there is an independent investigation.”

He declined to reveal the witnesses’ names, saying they are afraid that “the police will twist it.”

In a series of demonstrations, residents have also bitterly complained about a string of what they call “slaps in the face” by police after the shooting.

Peco’s sister, Jaquetha West, 21, said she was kept away from her brother’s body at gunpoint after she ran to the scene. Three weeks later, a patrol car ran over a courtyard memorial to Peco in what police have described as an accident. The matter is under investigation.

Last week, police arrested 44 residents in a controversial pre-dawn sweep ostensibly conducted to curb indiscriminate shooting on New Year’s Eve. A police spokesman said the department’s aim was to arrest people who have a known proclivity to fire guns, although none of those taken into custody were armed.

Gates said two suspects who were arrested Dec. 10 have confessed in tape-recorded statements that they, along with Peco, fired at the officers. An attorney for one of the men said his client, Kevin M. Jenkins, 18, was coerced.

“Any statements Jenkins made we will contend were coerced by police,” said Justin Groshan of the Alternate Defense Council. He declined to elaborate.

In the statement, according to Gates, Jenkins said he removed Peco’s AK-47 from the scene and hid it. Deputy Dist. Atty. Lenhart said Jenkins told police where the gun was hidden, but officers could not find it.

The inability of police to find the weapon has fueled much of the controversy and skepticism surrounding the shooting.

Jenkins and Marlon Kirkwood, 21, have been charged with six counts of attempted murder and six counts of assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. Jenkins also was charged with one count of accessory in connection with the removal of the rifle.

Peco’s family has retained attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., a civil rights lawyer who served as the county’s third-ranking prosecutor from 1978 to 1981. Cochran was out of town last week and attorney Eddie J. Harris, an associate on the Peco case, would only say that a preliminary review has been undertaken.

Peco, who had lived in Sacramento since the mid-1980s, was raised in Imperial Courts, graduated from Jordan High School and found work repairing cars, relatives said.

In 1982, he was sentenced to six years in prison for assault with a deadly weapon and was reportedly released in late 1984. He was on parole for three years, prison officials said.

At the time of his death he was visiting his mother over the Thanksgiving holiday.

City Councilwoman Joan Milke-Flores, whose district includes Imperial Courts, has remained quiet throughout the uproar, working behind the scenes to form a task force to deal with economic problems and crime at the project, where more than 50% of the residents are without jobs.

But other elected officials, including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, have become powerful allies to the tenants movement, rushing to spearhead a drive to challenge the Police Department’s account of the shooting and its treatment of the community.

“This situation is crying out for community-based policing, and the approach the police are taking is anything but that,” Ridley-Thomas said. “To conduct a police sweep against the background of the Henry Peco shooting seemed thoughtless, to say the least.”

Waters was more blunt during a recent tour of the project when she urged residents to record police activities with video cameras and tape recorders.

“Gates has no credibility,” Waters told anyone within earshot. “What we have here is a police state.”

Out of the controversy have emerged new community leaders such as Crouch and the Rev. Carl Washington, a Watts minister who has called for a ban on police officers at the project, pending results of an independent investigation.

Washington, who grew up in Imperial Courts and is the pastor of New Commandment Church two blocks away, said he will seek a Los Angeles Superior Court injunction Monday barring police from the project.

At a recent news conference held in the Imperial Courts gymnasium, Washington told reporters: “We don’t want the Los Angeles Police Department’s presence here anymore. We are tired of being treated like animals.”

Thus far, the Police Commission has not requested such an investigation and Washington has failed to gain widespread support for keeping police out.

Gates and other officials have dismissed such statements as rhetoric spouted by activists who are creating a gulf between residents and police in a community racked by violence and dominated by gangs.

“This has been blown out of proportion by politicians and others stirring up the pot,” said Police Sgt. J.D. Allen, who said he became an officer so he could serve the South-Central Los Angeles community where he grew up. “To them, police represent the white power structure and we have to overcome that and show them we can work together.”

Not all Imperial Courts residents--most of them female heads of households--side with Washington and his disdain for police.

“We need the police around here; there are too many break-ins,” said LaTanya Kennedy, as she visited her sister Barbara, who runs a job counseling center in the project that lost a typewriter, telephone and microwave oven in a burglary a week ago. “If I need them, I’m going to call them.”

In 1991, the three-square-block Imperial Courts project accounted for more than 50% of the crime in a one-square-mile reporting district, police said. The crimes included four murders, six rapes, 196 assaults with a deadly weapon, three arson fires, 28 reports of gunfire into dwellings and 92 residential burglaries.

In addition, officers patrolling the project were fired upon at least seven times in the last year. On Nov. 30, a day after the Peco shooting, one patrol car’s tires were slashed and a firebomb was tossed through the window of another police car.

“We definitely need the police because we couldn’t survive without them,” said Lorene Grant, 60, who has lived in Imperial Courts since 1954 and worries daily about the safety of her grandchildren.

“I shouldn’t have to worry about being jumped--but I do,” Grant said. “I pray so much my knees are sore.”