LOS ANGELES (AP) — Police shot and killed a man Sunday who struggled with officers on a sidewalk in the Skid Row section of downtown Los Angeles, authorities said.

The officers, who were answering a robbery call in the area at about noon, got into a struggle with the man, and tried to use a stun gun on him before shooting him, LAPD spokesman Sgt. Barry Montgomery said. He was later declared dead at a hospital.

Police did not immediately say how many officers were involved or how many shots were fired. Nor did they say whether the man was armed or identify him.

Witnesses told the Los Angeles Times that the man is known on the street in the area as "Africa," and that he had been there for four or five months.

Five or six officers were involved in the struggle, and two of them broke away to handcuff a woman who had picked up one of their dropped batons as the others wrestled the man to the ground, witnesses said.

One witness, Jose Gil, 38, told the Times he saw the man swinging at police then heard one of them shout, "he's got my gun!" before multiple shots were fired.

Dennis Horne, 29, said the man had been fighting with someone else in his tent before officers arrived.

"It's sad," Horne said. "There's no justification to take somebody's life."

Tents and cardboard shelters cover the sidewalks of Skid Row, the downtown neighborhood where an estimated 1,700 homeless people live. Many of them struggle with mental illness and addiction.

Los Angeles Police Commission President Steve Soboroff told the Times that the LAPD, the independent inspector general and the district attorney would all investigate the shooting "very, very carefully."

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, head of the activist group the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, called on the Police Commission to hold special hearing on use of force by officers in Skid Row encounters.

Hutchinson said in a statement that the shooting "underscores the need for the police commission to hold a special hearing to fully examine police tactics and training in the use of deadly force by LAPD officers involving skid row residents many of whom have major mental challenges."

Other recent deaths during police actions in New York and in Ferguson, Missouri, and the lack of prosecution of the officers involved, have brought nationwide protest.

The violence Sunday had echoes of the August shooting by Los Angeles police of 25-year-old Ezell Ford, whose death in a struggle with officers brought demonstrations in the city.

Ford was unarmed, but police officers said he was shot only after reaching for an officer's gun.