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WATCH: Brooklyn Man Accuses Police of Hate Crime, Attempt to Conceal Evidence
WATCH: Brooklyn Man Accuses Police of Hate Crime, Attempt to Conceal Evidence
A Brooklyn, N.Y., man who says he was gay-bashed by New York City police officers last weekend also says the cops tampered with a surveillance camera in his apartment building in an attempt to conceal evidence.
Jabbar Campbell, 32, was hosting a gay pride party Saturday night and into Sunday morning at his apartment in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Police first came to the building about 2:50 a.m., after a neighbor complained about noise, and they asked partygoers hanging around outside to keep the volume down.
About 10 minutes later, Campbell told the New York Daily News, another group of officers arrived and rang his buzzer. Before he let them in, he saw one reach up to disable the surveillance camera in the building's vestibule. When he did admit them, they accused him of resisting arrest and began beating him, and they also yelled antigay epithets, he said.
Two officers held his arms, another held his head, and a fourth one punched him repeatedly in the face, leaving him with a black eye and a split lip, and even more joined in, he told the New York Post. "They kept saying, 'stop resisting,' but I wasn't resisting," he said. "I didn't have any time to respond."
Campbell was treated at Kings County Hospital, then held in police custody for 24 hours, charged with resisting arrest, attempted assault, and marijuana possession. But he says he was the victim of a hate crime, and he intends to sue the city and nine officers.
The police "were trying to conceal the evidence by turning the camera away," Campbell's lawyer, Herb Subin, told the Daily News. "They committed a hate crime inside a gay pride event."
Watch the surveillance video below.
