All are in blue disposable gloves and all are struggling to hold him up.
"Are you the police?" he keeps asking as he drops in and out of consciousness. "I have been attacked. Can you help me? I feel funny."
The man is 30-something, maybe more. He's smart casual with a well-cut suit, sharp-toed shoes and matching cuts above and below his left eye.
It's an autumn Friday night just off one of Glasgow's main drags. It's past 11pm and the pubs are shutting.
The man is being propped up by four police officers under the yellow light of a lamp-post as they wait for an ambulance.
Parked nearby is a police van. Another man, in cuffs, is watching the first aid efforts through its window.
"They were boxing," explains Martin Cloherty, the chief inspector in charge of the city centre. "One shouted something at the other and they had a square go."
A dozen officers have centred on the one fight, alerted by colleagues monitoring CCTV. And not just any CCTV, but the dozen or so cameras pointed right at Glasgow's biggest trouble spots. They have arrived so quickly that the brawl hasn't had time to turn in to anything else.
It isn't just that the city has more police – it does – but force commanders, using increasingly skilled civilian intelligence analysts, are deploying their officers more smartly than ever before.
The result? Fights are not turning into serious assaults; serious assaults are not turning into murders; and serious violence in the centre of Glasgow is dropping dramatically.
Phil Braat is watching the police deal with the incident. "I am so impressed with the speed our officers got here," said the city centre councillor who doubles as convener of Strathclyde Police Authority.
"I suppose what we are seeing here is the seedy underbelly of the night-time economy; alcohol-fuelled violence. This is the kind of thing that could have been so much worse if the police hadn't got here on time."
Earlier Chief Inspector Cloherty had shown Mr Braat, a solicitor by trade, a map of the beats of central Glasgow.
Police now use the same definition of the city centre as The Evening Times and, usually, the council. This is the area hemmed to the north and west by the M8, to the east by the Cathedral precinct, High Street and the Saltmarket, and to the south by the River Clyde.
There are 19 city centre beats in all, including some of the busiest in Scotland, such as Alpha Bravo 11 around Central Station and Alpha Bravo 6 north of Argyle Street, each with its own crime totals.
We have crunched the figures to get a clear picture of exactly what is happening in the city centre. They tell a simple story.
Overall figures for crime reports have edged up over the last five or six years, to about 22,000 in total, thanks to vast numbers of officers ticketing minor offences such as public urinating
. And, far more importantly, overall reports of serious violent crime have plummeted – also, say police, due to the ticketing of petty offences.
The theory? Catch people misbehaving slightly sooner in the evening and they won't be carrying out more serious crimes later.
In 2011-12, for the first time in recent years, there was less than one serious violent crime – so-called Group 1 crimes, things like robberies, murders and serious assaults – per day in the centre of Glasgow.
The total was 330. Still very high by Scottish standards, but this was down from 400 last year. And from 777 when The Evening Times began our Crime on Your Street series in 2006-7. The number of people visiting the centre as the recession bites has fallen. But there has been no change to recording rules to explain this drop in crime. And it is not just serious violence that is falling: minor assaults are also down.
Back in the late night city centre, Neil Morrison could be a one-man opinion sample. Because he sees more of what happens than most.From his post outside RePlay, near Central Station, the doorman can see pairs of high-viz jackets in several directions.
"I have been outside this door for seven years," Mr Morrison said. "You still get your groups of punks and flash points. But serious violence has gone down. We just don't get the amount of trouble we used to."
david.leask@ eveningtimes.co.uk
n Police in 2011-12 issued 2217 tickets for urinating in public in the centre of Glasgow as part of its city-wide crackdown, including 569 in and around Charing Cross and Blythswood Square. Back in 2006-2007 the total number of city centre tickets for the offence was just 497.
n Another 2725 cases of public drinking were reported in the year, up from 960 six years ago. Public drinking and public urinating account for most of the overall increase in crime over the six year period.
n The number of reports of criminal knife-carrying has more than halved in the city centre over the last six years, from 173 in 2006-07 to 88 in 2011-12. This is despite – or perhaps because of – a huge rise in police stop-and-searches.
n Shoplifting figures are up, to 2648 in 2011-12 from 2208 in 2010-11 and 2200 in 2006-07.
