Immediately after a black teenager, Antonio Martin, was shot and killed by police near St. Louis, Missouri, there have been comparisons with the fatal Michael Brown shooting case in August and the death of Eric Garner in New York City earlier this year.
The main difference, however, in the two incidents was that Martin, 18, was armed and apparently pointed his weapon at the officer, which prompted the officer to pull his service revolver and fire at him. Brown was unarmed.
Police recovered the weapon that Martin apparently had on him.
It’s also worth noting that while Ferguson primarily has white political leadership, Berkeley’s city elected government is 100 percent black and the majority of its police officers are black, as St. Public Radio notes. Berkeley and Ferguson are located next to one another.
Berkeley Mayor Theodore Hoskins, who is also black, said that the Tuesday night shooting that killed Martin were quite different than the deaths of Brown and New York City man Eric Garner.
“You couldn’t even compare this to Ferguson or the Garner case in New York,” Hoskins said at a press conference, adding that surveillance footage at a Berkeley gas station shows the suspect pointing a gun at the officer who shot him.
But on social media websites like Twitter, some claimed that Martin was “denied medical care,” saying that no ambulance was called--or wasn’t called quickly enough.
At a press conference on Wednesday morning, St. Louis Police Chief Jon Belmar said that an ambulance arrived on the scene. Belmar said that EMS was on the scene within a half an hour and the body was removed from the scene within two hours, which is standard procedure. Video footage of the shooting was also released.
Unlike the day after the Ferguson shooting--where no video footage was released until much later--there was a full press conference from the police chief.
A YouTube video uploaded on Wednesday shows the aftermath of the shooting. Several women are heard screaming, “You’re putting him in a mini-van! You’re kidding me. How can you do that to somebody!” However, the van is likely a coroner’s van used to transport bodies.
