LOS ANGELES — A line of tents and people huddled in blankets filled the sidewalks of San Pedro Street on Monday in the heart of this city’s Skid Row. The occasional police car drove by. In the middle of the block, flowers were piled next to a note bidding goodbye to a man who had called this piece of sidewalk his home until Sunday afternoon.

The man, whom the police have not identified but who was known here as “Africa,” was shot to death shortly after noon on Sunday as officers tried to arrest him as a suspect in a robbery. The killing followed a series of episodes involving the deaths of apparently unarmed civilians at the hands of the police across the country that have raised questions about law enforcement tactics. A four-minute video of the fatal encounter here and its aftermath, which was taken by a bystander and uploaded to Facebook, has become a new symbol of what many people see as police abuses directed against minorities and the homeless.

Witnesses here said the encounter came as the police, who have been under pressure from business leaders to deal with this searing symbol of the nation’s homeless problem just blocks from a resurgent downtown, were trying to get people to take down tents. Many resisted: Los Angeles, though in the midst of a drought, was drenched with a series of intense and bone-chilling rainstorms through Sunday afternoon.

“The cops don’t want us here,” Ernie Soto, 34, who lay in a blanket near where the shooting took place, said Monday morning. “They tried to make an example out of him.”