FATAL SHOOTOUT IN SANTA CRUZ PROVOKES RAGE

Some Want Changes In Poor Neighborhood

A wild shooting near the Santa Cruz Boardwalk that left a gunman dead and a
police officer wounded has angry residents saying the liberal city's
leaders need to care as much about citizens' safety as they do about
offending the disadvantaged and their advocates.

"This is a war zone," said Pat, 61, a third-generation Santa Cruz resident
whose Victorian house sits on the Beach Flats alleyway where the Thursday
night gunfight took place. "I'm really angry and I'm sick of being a
prisoner in my own home."

She wouldn't give her last name for fear of retaliation from drug dealers
and gang members whose violence has plagued the largely poor, Latino
enclave for decades.

She complained that police patrols are increased during the summer tourist
season -- when the boardwalk draws most of its 3 million annual visitors.

"But as soon as the summer ends, the drug dealers are back on the corner
and I make calls (to police and City Hall) but nobody listens."

Thursday's police shooting -- combined with a surge in stabbings, heroin
overdoses and complaints about belligerent street people in downtown -- has
some residents, merchants and politicians calling for change.

Details of the shooting were still murky Friday.

Officers John Pursley and Pat Bayani were driving through the flats when
they spotted two males -- one adult, one juvenile -- whom they knew as
outsiders standing in the dirt lot of an alley known as an illicit drug
drive-through.

While questioning the two, Pursley was startled by a man later identified
as Jose Avalos sitting in nearby car with the door open.

Pursley was talking with Avalos when gunfire erupted, said police Lt. Joe
Haebe.

Initial indications are that Avalos fired first with a .45-caliber
automatic handgun and a bullet penetrated the left side of Pursley's
protective vest, breaking a rib and puncturing his lung, said Gary Brayton,
a Santa Cruz County prosecutor conducting the shooting investigation.

The two officers returned fire as they scrambled for cover. The repeated
bursts of gunfire made nearby residents think someone was shooting off
strings of firecrackers.

Avalos was described by police as a Mexican national in his mid-20s with a
long history of violence, including two California convictions for assault
with a deadly weapon. He was pronounced dead at the scene, Brayton said.

Investigators haven't been able to interview Pursley, who remained
hospitalized at Dominican Hospital on Friday. They also haven't determined
which officer killed the gunman.

The shooting hit the small police department hard.

Noting that Avalos had been deported twice after release from prison stints,

only to return to Santa Cruz, Haebe said: "When we're repeatedly dealing
with people like this in the community, it's a little bit like criminal
roulette. You never know when you're going to cross them."

The shooting has some saying the City Council needs to abandon a
decades-old policy of opposing new development in the Beach Flats area for
fear it would drive out low-income Latino residents.

"A decision was made about 20 years ago to do what I would categorize as a
progressive community putting a happy face on racial segregation," said
City Councilman Mark Primack. He said the city needs to stop neglecting the
troubled ghetto in the name of supporting "Hispanic solidarity."

"It's one thing to talk about how intolerable the (street people) behavior
has become downtown, but at the same time we're perpetrating an environment
of crime in our Beach Flats area."

Pat, the Beach Flats homeowner, said it's about time. She's put her house
on the market in April, but two days later a 23-year-old man was killed
outside the corner market in a gang shooting. The lone offer she had
evaporated.

"This should be the most prime real estate in Santa Cruz," she said. "It's
right near the beach, and there's all these quaint cottages back here."

Others agree. But, in 1998, a five-year plan to revitalize the Beach Flats
with a conference hotel, expanded boardwalk and retail shops and upscale
homes was gutted by a new "progressive" city council majority that feared
it would driving out the neighborhood's largely poor, Latino residents.