New York -
A 28-year-old unarmed man was killed after a rookie police officer shot him in New York's Brooklyn borough, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said on Friday.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the shooting late on Thursday in the darkened stairwell just before midnight was unprovoked.
The race of the victim and the shooter was not reported.
“We don't know enough yet, but it does appear to have been an accident,” de Blasio at a press conference.
“This was a tragedy.”
But he cautioned that the shooting was not like two other cases - those of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager shot in August by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri and a recent New York Case where a black man died after police put a strangle hold on him.
“Each incident is different ... each of them has their own dynamic,” de Blasio said.
“This is a tragic situation, that's the bottom line.”
De Blasio noted, however, that relations between New York police and communities of colour were far from healed and the city was working to “reform those dynamics.”
Brooklyn district attorney Ken Thompson said that the incident warranted an “immediate, fair and thorough investigation.”
The police officer, who had been on the job for less than one and a half years, has been reassigned and stripped of his badge and gun.
The shooting comes as a grand jury is expected to announce its decision whether to indict the police officer who shot Brown in Missouri. Tensions are high in Ferguson as the community awaits the decision.
According to the FBI and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, around 400 people are shot and killed by police every year across the United States. - Sapa-dpa