Bouncer brutality, is it a license to hit?

Following a recent incident that I experienced it got me thinking about the way bouncers at nightclubs act towards customers.

We all know that bouncers are there to keep the peace at a nightclub and prevent anything bad from happening such as fighting, drugs or anything worse, but some of them seem to take their role as a bouncer as an excuse to behave violently towards people because they’ll be able to get away with it.

It’s understandable that when violence at a club erupts and is shown towards them or certain customers abuse them professional standards may slip, as a certain amount of force or behaviour has to be used to defuse situations and remove people from clubs. However when it is their job to act professional they shouldn’t act in this way from the offset.

Recently I was at a nightclub enjoying myself when some random person decided to kick me, feeling a little confused about the situation my boyfriend, who hadn’t been drinking that night, decided to go and report it to the bouncers. However instead of listening to what had happened and ejecting the person who had in fact assaulted me for no reason, the bouncers took it upon themselves to eject me, my boyfriend and my friend from the nightclub. They used around seven or eight bouncers to remove three people, who up until that point in the night had been enjoying themselves dancing and talking. The incident also left us with bruises on our arms and marks on our necks.

Now this situation doesn’t seem to be exclusive to this club or to me as a recent report in Durham found that between October 2011 and February 2012 there had been 25 incidents reported surrounding the bouncers at the Durham One bar. Within these complaints eight people had reported the force used by bouncers, one reported being punched in the face, one person said they were pushed as they were trying to get in and cracked their head and another person even reported a broken leg. Police however couldn’t do anything surrounding many of these claims due to the lack of CCTV evidence.

Although I can’t vouch for these claims and I am completely unaware of their validity, you can see that where bouncers tend to use the excuse that professional standards slip slightly due to certain incidents, they appear to just treat everyone the same without asking questions.

Recently the fly on the wall television show Bouncers, based in Newport South Wales showed the dislike that many of the bouncers in the area showed towards customers. Yes there were people fighting and appearing to abuse door staff, but that didn’t justify the way that everyone was lumbered into the same category. This being that they were all troublemakers due to them having a drink.

I would appear that yes sometimes bouncers are put in a tricky predicament, but that doesn’t automatically give them a license to hit or assume that everyone is the same. If allegations against bouncers were taken more seriously then maybe this type of behaviour would calm down and they’d realise that not everyone is a violent drunk, and maybe people would find a newfound respect for the club door staff.