Factory bouncers under investigation after violent incident

Bouncers from the Manchester nightclub Factory are under investigation after they were involved in a violent fight last Saturday night.

A video that appears to show at least six Factory bouncers assaulting a young man outside the nightclub has gone viral across social media, prompting outrage. The video currently has over 800,000 views and has been shared 16,000 times since its release.

All of the bouncers in the video have since been sacked.

Manchester City Council has also launched their own investigation, where licensing chiefs will have the power to change the club’s opening hours, remove the ‘premises supervisor’ or even take its license away.

Councillor Rabnawaz Akbar has described the footage as “sickening”, whilst councillor Pat Karney has confirmed that “The club owners will be summoned in. We are working closely with Greater Manchester Police.”

The young man in the video has been named as 18 -year-old rugby league player Joe Sharatt, who suffered a serious head injury with minor bleeding to the brain. He is currently in a stable condition in hospital.

In a statement released on their Facebook page, Factory said they were “shocked” by what they had seen and that “Any security personnel found to be involved will be terminated with immediate effect, regardless of the outcome of any police investigation.”

“We have launched a full investigation into this distressing incident and will be working with the police, local authority and our third-party security provider to ensure that the matter is dealt with swiftly and appropriately.”

However, this is not the first time Factory bouncers have been accused of misconduct.

First-year History student Connor Harte told The Mancunion: “I’ve never been personally involved in a fight with them, but I’ve seen them use excessive force for seemingly very little reason, on one occasion 2 bouncers held a guy still while another bouncer repeatedly punched the guy in the face. Bouncers are supposed to use force only when it’s necessary, but I keep seeing and hearing about bouncers being over-zealous and really brutal when it’s unnecessary.”

Another student reportedly was told that the bouncers would “break his legs”, and a third student described the security staff at Factory as “notorious.”

Joseph Ricketts said: “In my opinion, Factory has a large share of the blame as they have known about this for a long time and the only reason they’ve decided to do anything about it is due to the media publicity.”

First-year Politics and Italian student Liam Danagher agreed: “It’s just one of those things you accept about life in Manchester, the bouncers in Factory are nasty but it’s bad that it’s taken eight of them assaulting a drunk teenager for this to be brought to light.”

Another student, who chose to stay anonymous, described how last year she “saw two bouncers removing a boy from the club [Factory], they had taken him outside and were both ganging up on him, pushing him around…it got to a point where I almost rang the police because they were being so unnecessarily violent.”

Factory has since terminated their contract with Professional Security, the firm which employed the bouncers.

Professional Security has also fired all the bouncers involved in the incident. In a statement on its website, the firm said it was “appalled” by the incident, which “contradicts everything that we strive to achieve at Professional Security.”