Upton resident Lelisca Johnson was visiting a friend a few blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue on Wednesday night, when she heard gunshots — or maybe firecrackers — that sounded far too close.

“Pop, pop,” Johnson said she heard, a pause, and then another quick, “pop pop.”

In an empty, grassy lot about a block away from Johnson’s Argyle Street rowhome, Baltimore Police officers fatally shot a man armed with a gun who fled an attempted traffic stop at about 8:45 p.m. He died at the scene, police said Wednesday.

The Independent Investigations Division of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office is investigating the West Baltimore shooting but had not yet released the names of the officers or the man who died by Thursday afternoon. The division typiHis death marks the third fatal Baltimore Police shooting this year.

In August, officers shot William Gardner, 17, a dozen times as he fled in a foot pursuit. Gardner, who was about to become a father, was holding a gun but didn’t shoot at police, according to body-camera footage. In May, Anthony Ferguson, 39, exchanged gunfire with police before they shot him, police video showed.

Last year, two people died in city police shootings, including a 27-year-old man who shot at police during a foot chase in Millhill.

On Wednesday night, a Baltimore Police officer found a sedan that had crashed into a parked car in the 1500 block of Pennsylvania Avenue after the sedan’s driver went the wrong way, the attorney general’s office said in a news release Thursday. The officer asked the man to get out of the car and sit on a curb, which he did at first, before running to a “wooded area” near the intersection of Argyle Avenue and Pitcher Street as the officer chased him on foot.

That officer and two more who arrived ordered the man to halt and show his hands, but he instead “displayed a gun” and the officers fired, the attorney general’s office said. Police rendered aid and called for medics, but the man died at the scene. Investigators found a loaded handgun near the man, according to the release.

Baltimore Police policy instructs officers not to use “more force than is necessary” to arrest someone after a foot pursuit. The policy adds that it is “prohibited to use force to punish persons for fleeing, resisting arrest, or assaulting a member.”

The department has a history of using force on people who flee from arrest. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice wrote in its investigation of the Baltimore Police Department that officers “frequently engage in foot pursuits of individuals, even where the fleeing individuals are not suspected of violent crimes.” Those tactics, the Justice Department said, endanger officers, endanger the community and “frequently lead to officers using excessive force on fleeing suspects who pose minimal threat.”

“Foot pursuits of individuals for low-level offenses are also an unsafe tactic that unnecessarily endangers officers and community members,” the investigation said.

Police have not specifically said what crime police suspected of the man killed Wednesday.

It’s not clear whether the man is accused of having pointed his weapon at police. Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley said Wednesday night that police don’t know if the gun recovered at the scene was fired.

On Thursday morning, the remnants of police tape were still visible in the empty lot, surrounding a trash-filled ditch along a fence blocking off railroad tracks running below street level.

The lot borders Pennsylvania Avenue, near the Shake and Bake Family Fun Center, a roller rink and bowling alley operated by Baltimore City Recreation and Parks billed as the “home of the soul bowl.” A hot dog vendor parked on the street played loud, upbeat music Thursday.

Johnson, 62, said police still had the streets around her Argyle home blocked off at around 11 p.m. Wednesday as she tried to return home.

“That? That’s not nothing new,” she said of another nearby crime scene.

Two men died in shootings in Sandtown-Winchester, the neighborhood bordering Upton, in the last month.

Johnson’s block has several vacant houses, at least three marked with a red X that indicates the homes are too unstable for city firefighters to safely enter should they catch fire, but it is also home to older residents who have lived there for decades.

“I don’t really feel unsafe,” she said, “I just stay aware.”

A night shift worker, she mostly keeps to herself, Johnson said.

Johnson said the quality of the police officers in her neighborhood varies, with “good ones” and “bad ones.”

“I don’t have any gripes about the police officers here, they’re doing what they need to do,” she said.

An apartment building around the corner on the 1500 block of Pennsylvania Avenue employs its own private security guards too, she said.

The ditch in the vacant lot on Argyle Avenue and Pitcher Street where the man fled was recently a spot where people would use drugs, but recently, city workers have cut the grass regularly, Johnson said.

Samuel Cornish Sr., who lives on nearby Laurens Street, rode a scooter past the crime scene Thursday morning.

In August, his friend Melvin Rich III, or PJ, was shot less than half a mile away the 1300 block of North Carey Street. Rich died in mid-September.

Many young people in the area carry guns, he said, for the “robbing season” in the colder months when it gets dark early, or just for their own protection.

“When you live in the Wild West, you gotta act like you live in the Wild West,” he said.

Firearms are easy to come by, as long as someone has money or is willing to steal one, Cornish said.

“Long as you got that bread, you gonna get that gun,” he said.

Cornish hopes to leave the neighborhood and move to Ohio. He said police officers who patrol Pennsylvania Avenue do little to curb drug dealing, and only act when there’s a shooting.

“They don’t care about the drugs anymore,” Cornish said. But he said he expects that might change soon, because of policies of the Baltimore State’s Attorney: “Ivan Bates is gonna stop that s–t.”

Baltimore Sun reporters Darcy Costello and Dillon Mullan contributed to this article.

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