Mayor says surveillance camera shows victim pointing gun at officer

Protests flared into early on Thursday in the St. Louis suburb where a white policeman fatally shot a black man who brandished a gun at a gas station on Tuesday night.

A group of protesters marched onto Interstate 170 in the city of Berkeley, Missouri, around 7 pm on Wednesday, blocking traffic for about 45 minutes. The demonstration followed a vigil at the Mobil On The Run gas station where the shooting occurred.

The site was just a few miles from the Ferguson street where a white police officer shot dead 18-year-old Michael Brown in August, fueling weeks of protests across the country.

Demonstrations that drew as many as 150 people were largely peaceful throughout the night, but at one point, officers disrupted an attempt by several people to break into a beauty supply shop.

At least two people were taken into police custody. Authorities were unable to provide further details.

Unlike the shooting of Brown, which was not captured on video, Berkeley Mayor Theodore Hoskins said surveillance footage appeared to show Antonio Martin pulling a gun on the unidentified 34-year-old officer who questioned him and another man about a theft at a convenience store. Brown was unarmed.

"You couldn't even compare this with Ferguson or the Garner case in New York," Hoskins said, referring to the chokehold death of Eric Garner, another black man killed by a white police officer.

He also noted that unlike in Ferguson, where a mostly white police force serves a mostly black community, more than half of the officers in his city of 9,000 are black, including top command staff.

Shortly after the shooting on Tuesday night, a crowd of up to 300 people gathered at the scene, where bricks and three fireworks were thrown, two of them at the roughly 50 officers at the scene, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said.

Two officers were injured and four people were arrested for assault, Belmar said.

The shooting occurred three days after a man summarily shot dead two officers in their patrol car in New York City, targeting them only because of the uniform they were wearing.

Police release video

The Berkeley encounter unfolded after the officer, a six-year veteran of the town's police department who was responding to a report of a theft, got out of his car to talk to two men at the gasoline station.

One of them pointed a loaded 9 mm handgun at the officer, Belmar said. Police released an indistinct, distant surveillance video from the gas station, edited to end just before the shooting.

In the corner of the frame, one of the people at the station can be seen raising one or both arms in what might be a shooter's stance near the police car, although the footage is too dark and grainy to establish that the person is holding a gun.

Two other videos released later by St. Louis County Police were similarly ambiguous, recorded by security cameras that appear to have only restricted views of the scene.

Reuters - AP

(China Daily 12/26/2014 page12)