Video shows a man grabbing and throwing a female UC Berkeley student to the ... trends now

Parents of University of California, Berkeley students who hired private security to protect their children saw their investment pay off when one of the guards thwarted an attack on campus. 

DailyMail.com has obtained video showing a man grabbing a young woman, shaking her, then tossing her to the pavement. Luckily, one of the private guards hired by  parent safety group SafeBears - troubled by the rampant crime in the college town - arrived just in time to stop the man from kicking the her and succeeded in chased him off. 

The attack happened shortly after midnight Saturday March 23 just south of campus on the final night of a 17-day pilot program. SafeBears paid $42,000 to hire the private security vendor Streetplus, which assigned six 'safety ambassadors' to patrol around campus between 6.30pm and 3am.

The guard, who asked not to be named, told DailyMail.com, 'She's extremely lucky. Our presence there saved this girl from getting her face broken.'

A short video clip shows the man grabbing the woman and appears to kick her, as a voice could be heard shouting, 'Hey, hey, hey, hey!'

The guard told DailyMail.com that he was the one yelling, and that he shot the video on his cell phone while radioing to his team to call 911.

'She was struggling to get up,' he recalled. 'The guy was in a rage. He pulled his leg back and he was about to kick her. I ran up and started yelling, real loud.'

The guard said he tucked his phone away as he approached. The perpetrator, seeing him, backed off and ran over to a blue Mercedes. 

The guard tried to block the man's escape by slamming an open door shut, but the perpetrator climbed in through another passenger's seat. The security guard said he reached for his phone, trying but failing to get a picture of the license plate as the car drove off.

SafeBears, a nonprofit comprised mostly of concerned parents, raised funds for the two-and-a-half-week pilot program that saw security guards in fluorescent jackets milling about campus.

The unarmed officials surveilled several blocks around the university from March 6 through March 23, operating separately from UC Berkeley's campus police department.

The program came on the heels of a spike in crime in the city that saw a massive push to reduce police presence during the Black Lives Matter movement.

Speaking to NBC Bay Area, Sagar Jethani, the president of SafeBears and father of two students, said the program had received 'positive feedback.' He and other members of the organization hope to see more private security hired in the future.

'It went really well, we brought in a total of six safety ambassadors, some were deployed on foot, some on bicycles,' Jethani explained.

'They provided escorts to students who need them, security escorts, they provided directions, they were also just a very visible deterrent to crime.'

UC Berkeley saw a spike in crime between 2021 and 2022. Most notably, the number of aggravated assaults jumped from 54 to 63.

Parents asserted that university police were understaffed and overwhelmed by the rising violence.

Parents' worries came to a head in 2022, when, following an altercation one block away from campus, a student was shot and killed.

Police said

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