Fight Breaks Out Over Confederate Flag On Truck One thing is for sure, some people are EXTRA passionate about keeping their Confederate flags . One group of men outside a Salt Lake City hotel decided they were going to force two white men to either move their car or remove a Confederate flag magnet off of their car — to the point where things got physical. Now, one of the victims is pushing to have the beating labeled a hate crime . Via NYDN : Investigators have yet to find the six or seven unidentified African-American men seen beating up two white men outside the Red Lion Hotel in a YouTube video, Salt Lake City Police Det. Cody Lougy told the Daily News Thursday night. Prosecutors will decide whether they follow one victim’s wishes and charge the suspects with hate crimes in the Sunday morning assault, Lougy noted. But the three-by four-inch decal touched off an argument that turned physical, he said. The group can be heard in the video telling one of the white men to move his truck and saying that one of them is “mad he has a f—— Confederate flag on the back of his s—.” A man with a Halloween mask on top of his head knocks one of the white men down with one punch before the group gangs up on the other one and beats him up in the footage. Neither man was hospitalized after the attack, according to Lougy. The victims say that had roles been reversed, they would definitely be charged with a hate crime. So they want the same treatment for this instance: The pair of men from Wyoming had come to town for the Garth Brooks concert Saturday night, one of the victims, Kelly Leeper, told the Deseret News. They went to the show with one of their friends who is black, and the First Amendment gives him the right to display Confederate imagery even though it can be controversial to do so, he said. Leeper wants the authorities to charge the suspects with hate crimes and he’ll “be damned if I ever come to Salt Lake again without bringing my gun,” he told KTSU-TV. “If the situation was reversed, and if there was a large group of white males who confronted two black gentlemen who, hypothetically, had a sticker on their vehicle that said, ‘Black lives matter,’ it would be dubbed a hate crime in a heartbeat,” Leeper said in the Deseret News. “So where’s the double standard there?” Hmmmm…do you agree? They definitely didn’t need to attack the men, especially if neither of them said anything to the group to begin with. But should this be treated as a race-based attack?
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Hate Crime? Five Black Men Attack 2 White Men Over Confederate Flag Truck Decal [Video]
