An aggressive response from city hall tonight over claims that Rochester cops ignored an alleged case of gay-bashing. One city councilman is speaking out. An internal investigation within the Rochester police department is now moving forward. It's an investigation that Councilman Bill Pritchard says he will follow every step of the way.

Rochester police have started to interview the victims of an alleged gay bashing. They already told their story to us including some who did not want their faces shown. The alleged victims say city police did nothing after they were brutally beaten by a group that used anti-gay slurs.

"When something like this does happen it causes everybody and certainly it caused me to pause and certainly register a certain amount of shock,” said Councilman Bill Pritchard.

Pritchard is following the case closely. According to the alleged victims, they were on Goodman Street early Friday morning when the attack took place. They called police, but they say instead of arresting their attackers, cops took three of them into custody. One says an officer slashed his toe with a knife, another says an officer referred to her as a 'drunken dyke.'

The lawsuit claims "that responding officers showed 'deliberate indifference' and mocked them with gay slurs," according to the Democrat & Chronicle:

"The lawsuit — filed by Dave Greenlaw, Josh Lieberman, Megan Barrett and Christine Herrick — states that law enforcement 'treated the plaintiff's complaints of harassment differently from other types of harassment for an extended period of time, thus failing to protect the plaintiffs.' At one point, Greenlaw called 911, complaining that police weren't doing anything. A sheriff's deputy responded, according to the lawsuit but, once told of the situation, said nothing could be done and left.

The alleged victims say city police did nothing after they were brutally beaten by a group that used anti-gay slurs.

[...]

According to the alleged victims, they were on Goodman Street....

Wonder why WROC is treating this differently than any other police-abuse story? Say, two black teens who end up with broken noses after a sojourn in the darkened backseat of of a squad car? Why so different? Hmmm... wow, drawing a blank. Anybody? Anybody?

I see no reason to go galloping to the conclusion that the story means to say what it says.

Police and a civilian review board in Rochester. N.Y., on Thursday upheld formal allegations of misconduct by eight people who say they were gay-bashed in June both by an unruly group and the police officers who responded, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported.

The residents, who have sued the city over the June 1 incident, say they were attacked with fists, kicks, slurs and a metal rod because some members of their party were gay. They said that when they called police, the officers arrested three of the victims but let the instigators go, and that at least two officers called them "drunken dyke" and other slurs.

"I'm here to say that we made some mistakes," Rochester Police Chief David Moore told WHAM-TV.

After the bashed residents hired a lawyer in mid-June, the police started looking for the four civilians -- two male, two female -- they had released. The suspects have since been identified but not arrested, WHAM said.

The allegations against the four civilian suspects will go to the Monroe County grand jury for possible indictment, the station said.