Protests flare after Missouri cop kills black

Protests flared into early yesterday in the St Louis suburb where a white American 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 7pm on Wednesday, blocking traffic for roughly 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 kilometers from the Ferguson street where a white police officer shot dead 18-year-old Michael Brown in August, fueling weeks of protest 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.

Black public officials in Missouri were at pains to distinguish the death of the suspect, whom they noted was holding a gun, from cases of unarmed black men who had been killed by police officers. The latter incidents have led to protests across the United States.

“This is not a policeman in the city of Berkeley going out half-cocked,” Berkeley Mayor Theodore Hoskins said at a news conference. “You could not even compare this with Ferguson.”

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 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 9mm handgun at the officer, Belmar said. Police released an indistinct surveillance video from the gas station, edited to end just before the shooting.

The officer fired three shots, Belmar said, a sequence captured on one of the three videos. One bullet struck the man with the gun, whom paramedics declared dead at the scene.

The St Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper named him as 18-year-old Antonio Martin.

Police officers watch as demonstrators protest outside the Mobil On-The-Run gas and convenience store in Berkeley, Missouri on December 24, 2014. [Xinhua photo]

Police officers watch as demonstrators protest outside the Mobil On-The-Run gas and convenience store in Berkeley, Missouri on December 24, 2014. [Xinhua photo]

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