CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — Crown Heights locals launched a video campaign with a message to the police officers who shot down an unarmed Saheed Vassell in their neighborhood last month.

"He was no enemy to nobody around here," said Vassell's friend Josh in a video published Thursday. "[Police] came into our community and killed him like a stray dog." Advocates from the Brooklyn Movement Center are producing a series of video interviews with locals who knew Vassell — the bipolar man shot down by police on April 4 by police officers who mistakenly believed he had a gun — in an attempt to preserve the memory of #TheRealSaheed.

#TheRealSaheed campaign will collect narratives from residents who, like Josh, remember Vassell as a man who was "a good brother to our community" and "was loved." "Saheed, our brother, was murdered by the hands of the police," said Josh, who was interviewed in the video where his friend Vassell used to work. "It's affecting each and every one of us young black youths … it could be any one of us."

BMC published its first video Thursday morning and will release one new interview each day in upcoming week, organizers said. "After the NYPD killed Saheed, it engaged in additional violence against his family and community by trying to vilify him as a way to justify the unjust killing," said BMC deputy director Anthonine Pierre.

"The NYPD's efforts to dehumanize Saheed is in conflict with reality, and these videos provide a window into the reality and perceptions of real people rather than the self-serving propaganda campaign by the NYPD."

Tensions have been mounting between police — who released 911 transcripts from the day of Vassell's death that they say justifies the officers' drawing their weapons — and family and community members outraged that an unarmed man was shot dead.

Saheed Vassell's photograph was taped to a pole on the corner of Montgomery Street and Utica Avenue, where he was shot by police on April 4. Photo by Kathleen Culliton Former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman promised to investigate the shooting but it is unclear what will happen to that investigation after he left his post in the wake of a personal #MeToo scandal.

Which is why several local advocacy groups have rallied behind the Vassell family with hopes of organizing the community and changing the way Crown Heights is policed.