A group of white males beat a 29-year-old black man in a racially charged attack in the wee hours of the morning yesterday in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, police said.

The victim, Alex Moore, 29, was on his way home from a friend’s house around 1:30 a.m. when the throng of between six and eight males set upon him, hurling racial epithets while striking him with bats and pipes, police said. The suspects took $50 from Mr. Moore. The incident ended when two people in a passing car stopped to help Mr. Moore, police said. They called 911, and the suspects fled on foot.

Mr. Moore was taken to Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center in serious but stable condition.

The robbery occurred on the corner of East 59th Street and Avenue N, in an interracial area. Police are considering it a possible bias attack.

Mayor Bloomberg said the New York Police Department’s Hate Crimes Unit started working on the case “the instant it was reported.” The mayor spoke on “Open Line” on KISS-FM radio yesterday morning.

“We’ve got to understand, we are all here together, that discrimination against anybody is discrimination against everybody, and we can’t have any tolerance whatsoever for any hate crimes,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

The Brooklyn attack raised fresh fears among the borough’s residents and politicians.

“I don’t feel safe walking around the neighborhood anymore,” a Flatlands 18-year-old, Kaz Stewart, said. In the 10 years he has lived at 58th Street and Avenue N, he said there has only been one occasion when he felt himself the victim of a hate crime – when someone traveling by in a vehicle yelled a racial slur at him.

One man who lives at East 59th Street, Colwin Chester, 35, said in the six years he has lived there, this is the first hate crime he has heard about.

State Senator Carl Kruger, a Democrat whose district includes part of the 63rd Precinct – in which the crime occurred – as well as parts of the 60th, 62nd, 66th, and 70th precincts and the entire 61st Precinct, expressed outrage over the incident.

“Last night we saw this disgusting incident on 59th Street,” he said.

While major crime is down in the city, Mr. Kruger said, police are not committing enough resources to solving hate crimes. He pointed to statistics for the adjacent 61st Precinct and the borough of Brooklyn as evidence. The precinct was reported to have the most hate crimes of the city’s 76 precincts, according to figures covering the period between 2000 and last December 31, collected by the Police Department at the request of the New York Times. Of the five boroughs, Brooklyn, the most populous, had the greatest percentage of the hate crimes recorded in the five-year period, with 33%. The senator is offering a reward of $1,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators of the crime, and he established a 24-hour anonymous hotline for tips, at 718-743-1089. Hate crimes, such as the one yesterday morning, “can’t be tolerated,” Senator Kruger said.

This year, the number of reported hate crimes in the 63rd Precinct has increased compared to the same period last year. Between January 1 and July 31, 2005, there were four such incidents, police said. For the same period last year, there was only one case. This year, for the same seven-month period, there were 53 hate crimes in Brooklyn, police said, compared with 46 in 2004.

The Brooklyn statistics contrast with citywide numbers, which show, as with other major crimes, a decrease in the number of crime reports. In 2005, there were 164 hate crimes reported for the first seven months of the year versus 172 in 2004, police said.

The attack occurred 40 minutes after a possible hate crime in Manhattan, police said. About 12:50 a.m. a 33-year-old black man was walking with a white male, 29, in the Chelsea area. When the men reached the corner of 18th Street and Ninth Avenue, a male made a homophobic remark and with his fists struck the black man in the face, police said. A struggle ensued, during which another male allegedly punched the black male in the back of the head. The suspects fled.

The victim was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he was treated for facial and shoulder injuries and was then released, police said.

During the weekend, there was a third possible bias incident, in St. George, Staten Island. On Friday at 10:20 p.m., eight black men assaulted and robbed three Hispanic males, ages 18, 19, and 20, at Targee and Broad streets, police officials said.

As police tell it, the suspects flung anti-gay comments at the victims and tore out the youngest male’s earring, causing a minor injury. One of the perpetrators tossed a bottle, hitting the 19-year-old victim in the back. The bottle did not break and he suffered no injuries. The suspects snatched the oldest victim’s cell phone from his hand. That victim remained unharmed.

The series of apparent hate crimes over the weekend comes around two months after what police said was a violent attack on three black men by a group of white men in Howard Beach, Queens, a crime reminiscent of the high-profile, racially motivated Howard Beach attack 20 years earlier during which one man, Michael Griffith, died.