Police fatally shot an unarmed man in Brooklyn on Wednesday after mistaking a metal pipe he was holding for a gun, authorities said. The death of Saheed Vassell, 34, provoked hours of emotionally charged protests.

About 4:40 p.m., police received three 911 calls reporting a black man in a brown jacket pointing what was “described as a silver firearm” at people on the street in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, said Terence Monahan, the New York Police Department’s chief of department.

Five officers — three in plainclothes and two in uniform — responded to the scene at Utica Ave. and Montgomery St., Monahan said.

When they arrived, they saw Vassell “brandishing what appears to be a firearm, pointing it at people,” he said.

“The suspect then took a two-handed shooting stance and pointed an object at the approaching officers,” Monahan said.

Four of the officers opened fire on Vassell and struck him several times, police said. In all, three plainclothes officers and one uniformed officer fired 10 rounds between them, Monahan said.

According to Monahan, the officers immediately rendered medical aid to Vassell, who was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.

Monahan held up an image of the scene captured seconds before the officers approached Vassell, and said surveillance video along the street corroborated the officers’ account of what happened. None of the officers were wearing body cameras, he said.

The object that Vassell was holding wound up being “a metal pipe with some sort of knob on the end of it,” Monahan said.

Vassell lived just around the corner from where the shooting took place.

The shooting drew an angry crowd to the busy Crown Heights intersection to confront about a dozen additional police officers who had arrived at the scene.

“It’s not a crime scene! You murdered him!” a woman can be heard screaming, hoarsely, between expletives. “A young man in his own community, shot down — yet again!”

“Ten times?” another man demanded, referring to the number of rounds fired. “For what?”

Vassell’s father, Eric Vassell, told the New York Times that his son, a welder, had moved to the United States from Jamaica when he was 6. Saheed Vassell had bipolar disorder and had been hospitalized several times in recent years, the elder Vassell told the newspaper.

He was a fixture in the neighborhood — and his mental illness was widely known to residents and police, the Times reported, according to interviews with multiple residents.

“Every cop in this neighborhood knows him,” John Fuller told the newspaper.

Jaccbot Hinds, 40, told the New York Daily News that he witnessed the shooting and said officers did not warn Vassell before opening fire.

“They just hopped out of the car,” Hinds told the newspaper. “It’s almost like they did a hit. They didn’t say please. They didn’t say put your hands up, nothing.”

Police on Wednesday did not address whether they gave Vassell any warnings. NYPD representatives did not immediately respond to questions sent by email Thursday morning.

Vassell’s death came amid heightened tensions nationwide regarding police accountability. On March 18, Sacramento police killed 22-year-old Stephon Clark as they responded to reports of a vandal in a neighborhood. Clark was shot eight times, mostly in the back, as he ran to his grandmother’s back yard, according to an autopsy requested by his family.

Police in California said they opened fire on Clark because they thought he had a gun, but later said he had only a white iPhone in his hand. Clark’s death triggered weeks of intense protests and public outrage in Sacramento.

When asked at a news conference Wednesday how the Crown Heights shooting compared with similar incidents across the country — and how police could prevent future shootings like it, including their responses to people with mental illness — Monahan declined to answer.

“Again, this is officers facing an incident on the street. Let’s stay focused on what they did today,” he said. “This was not an emotionally disturbed call. This was a call of a man pointing what 911 calls and people felt was a gun at people on the street. When we encounter him, he turns what appears to be a gun at the officers. We have to stay straight on the facts of this incident today.”

A Washington Post analysis found that, of the 987 people killed by police last year, 68 were unarmed. Of those unarmed people, 30 were white, 20 were black and 13 were Hispanic, showing an overrepresentation of African Americans compared to their percentage of the U.S. population. Five of the remaining fatalities were of unknown or other race.

A Post analysis published last year found that since 2006, the nation’s largest police departments have fired at least 1,881 officers for misconduct. Departments reinstated 450 officers after appeals required by union contracts.

Mark Berman and Alex Horton contributed to this report.

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