What If the Key to Ending Homelessness is Just That—a Key?

The whole mess started around noon on a Sunday in March, when two homeless men on L.A.’s Skid Row got into some sort of spat. Something about a tent, or the location of a tent, or the contents of a tent. Typical Skid Row stuff, the kind of thing you can’t avoid seeing in a 50-block area where 1,500 of the city’s most destitute souls—most of them mentally ill or drug addicts or both—sleep in their own filth and throw elbows just to survive. So there was an argument, and someone called the cops, and when they arrived the officers approached Charly Keunang, a Cameroonian national known among fellow street dwellers as Africa. Video footage captured by a civilian and a surveillance camera tells us the rest. Keunang is pretty worked up when the cops arrive. Uncooperative, he retreats to his tent. The cops—four of them—pull Keunang out. A scuffle ensues, and in short order police take the man to the ground. They hold him, try to pin and subdue him, punch him in the head, and attempt to restrain his flailing legs. One of the officers yells something unintelligible about a gun and then, a moment later—shots. No fewer than five of them. Keunang dies on the sidewalk.