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Brooklyn to YouTube pranksters: You're kind of racist and could get yourselves killed

"People in these bad neighborhoods [are] a bit more aggressive than people in Manhattan," observes 20-year-old Mohammed Etayyim.

By Matt Bradwell

NEW YORK, July 10 (UPI) -- Two brothers in New York have raised the ire of Brooklyn residents and the African-American community for a producing series of Candid Camera-style videos of themselves playing tricks on people in underprivileged communities.

Etayimm Etayyim, 21, and his 20-year-old brother Mohammed started off filming their videos in Manhattan, but recently began staging the so-called pranks in significantly less privileged areas.

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"We wanted to take our pranks to the next level," Mohammed Etayyim said when they first began drawing attention.

"The difference with people in these bad neighborhoods is they're a bit more aggressive than people in Manhattan."

The other difference is the brothers' behavior, such as grabbing people's cell phones to "just check the time" and asking random strangers "do you have a problem" before confronting them with a calculator, is far more dangerous in Brooklyn -- and to some, offensive.

"This is juvenile ignorant behavior that borders racist overtones," local community leader Tony Herbert told the New York Daily News.

"It truly can go really wrong at any given time thus causing harm not only to the victims but even more so to pranksters."

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Despite calls from activists from Brownsville and East New York publicly asking the brothers to stop and asking YouTube to ban their videos, the Etayyims insist they plan to keep filming and posting.

"We target everybody, white people, Spanish people, not only black people," Etayimm rationalized.

"It's just for fun...we're just going to keep doing it."

Although they will continue to sit on strangers laps and pretend to sell weapons to would-be criminals for laughs, the Etayyims are not entirely ignorant to the danger they're putting themselves in.

"Brownsville is the deadliest neighborhood in New York City," Mohammed said.

"Yesterday we heard news that three people got stabbed and one got killed not far from where we filmed. So we had to be careful."

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