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A student is subdued by police outside of World Cafe Live. The Big Man on Campus event was disrupted because event staff called police to help control an unruly crowd of students. [Toby Hicks/The Daily Pennsylvanian]

Several students are claiming to be victims of brutality after police broke up a crowd gathered outside a sorority event Thursday night.

Penn and Philadelphia police were called to disperse a crowd of 400 to 600 students who were waiting to enter Alpha Chi Omega's Big Man on Campus event at World Cafe Live.

When entry to the event was closed after an altercation between students and a bouncer, witnesses say police aggressively hit students with nightsticks as they were in the process of leaving. Some say police used force against as many as 50 students.

Philadelphia Police did not return phone calls for comment over the weekend.

College sophomore Eyob Yohannes said he was beaten, handcuffed and taken to the 18th District headquarters at 55th and Pine streets, where he was released without charges.

"We're walking towards the stairs [to leave], and there are like 20 cops just pushing us with their sticks, being so aggressive," Yohannes said of his experience at the venue. "I was pretty nice about it, and I wasn't belligerent. I wasn't acting up. I wasn't being rude to them."

Yohannes decided that he wanted to report one officer who he felt was particularly aggressive.

"I just asked him, 'Can I have your badge number, please?' and after that, the cop just got really angry at me ... and then said, 'You want my badge number?' And then like five or six cops just pummeled me," Yohannes said.

Yohannes says he now has a bruise on his right thigh where one officer repeatedly hit him with a nightstick and that he can barely move his wrists due to the handcuffs.

Yohannes was taken into police custody, but he said that when he fully explained himself to the officer whose badge number he had asked for, he was let go.

He walked back to campus alone at about 11:45 p.m. He does not plan to take any legal action.

Wharton junior Gunnar Jacobs said he was one of the first people "to get beaten" by police.

"I asked them if they were planning on reimbursing everyone [for the $10 BMOC tickets]. ... Just because of that, a group of cops pushed me, and there was a Penn bike cop behind me. I tripped over his bike, and I guess that they thought I was trying to do something," Jacobs wrote in an e-mail.

Jacobs said police pushed him to the ground, picked him up, slammed his face against the hood of a police car and handcuffed him. Jacobs said that he told the officers that he had a herniated disk in his spinal chord and that and one cop told him to shut up.

Jacobs said the officer then hit him in the neck with his nightstick. As other conflicts erupted, the officer released Jacobs, telling him that police needed to control a larger fight.

"It just shows you how brutal they are when they really don't need to be," Yohannes said. "It was mayhem. It was absolute mayhem."

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