Staff and students will be aware that countrywide student protests were planned for December 3^rd, and that such a protest occurred around and inside our Senate House building on main campus that afternoon.

As usual Warwick’s security team were on hand to help facilitate what we expected would be the usual peaceful and safe demonstration. As protesters attempted to enter Senate House en masse, one of the security team was faced with an unprovoked act of violence and was injured such that we had no alternative but to ask police officers to attend the scene to investigate that incident although the subsequent protest activity had become peaceful.

The police responded quickly to investigate the alleged incident and efforts were made with the group to identify the individual. However this was not forthcoming and the police were then met by significant resistance and had to face a very challenging situation which they were obliged to respond to and resolve. The matter is now in hands of the police. The Police were not called as a result of a peaceful protest on campus, but were responding to an alleged assault on a member of staff. The University intends to co-operate fully with the police investigation.

Warwick has a decades long history of co-operation between protestors and the security team to ensure that we can facilitate peaceful and safe protests on our campus. We are sure that the vast majority of those members of our University community seeking to mount demonstrations on our campus continue to want those protests to be peaceful and safe for all and will share our hope that this unprovoked act of violence against our security team is an aberration.

We note that the students intend to mount another protest on campus tomorrow and welcome the Student Union’s reference to the planned protest being peaceful.

A statement from the Vice-Chancellor can be found at:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/statement_from_the/