A recent attack on a Deutsche Bahn employee on a regional train near Kaiserslautern has drawn attention to growing violence against railway staff. The conductor confronted a man traveling without a valid ticket on Monday night and asked him to leave at the next stop. The passenger then attacked and repeatedly punched the conductor, who lost consciousness, had to be resuscitated and died a day later in hospital from a brain hemorrhage caused by blunt force trauma. The suspected attacker is now in custody.
Official figures underline the scale of the problem: nearly 3,000 railway employees were attacked last year. The German Interior Ministry says that on average five railway staff are physically assaulted and four threatened every day. One conductor told the Süddeutsche Zeitung, “I don’t check tickets because I want to get home alive.”
Violence researcher Jonas Rees of Bielefeld University, who has studied assaults on railway employees for more than a year, says the trend is not new. “We have seen a steady increase in violence since 2015,” he told DW. For at least the past decade, verbal abuse, insults, threats and physical attacks have become part of everyday life for many employees. Rees added that the key issue is what society has become accustomed to regarding misconduct and violence over recent years.
Rees’s research finds particular patterns: incidents spike when passengers are intoxicated, when trains are overcrowded or delayed, and when people travel to or from major events. The day of the week matters too — assaults rise significantly on Saturdays and especially on Friday evenings after work. Ticket inspections are a frequent flashpoint.
The rail setting creates conditions that can encourage violence, Rees says: it is a public space where alcohol is often consumed and offenders can quickly escape by getting off at the next stop. Railway employees are not the only public servants affected — police officers, firefighters and paramedics also face rising attacks. Rees notes that uniforms can make employees appear as proxies for institutions, provoking attacks directed at the state or the railway. His team also surveyed 2,000 teachers in North Rhine-Westphalia and found growing harassment and assaults by students and sometimes by parents.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt of the Christian Social Union has called for tougher minimum penalties for attackers and said the suspect should face the full force of the law. Rees, however, doubts that harsher sentences will prevent impulsive, rapidly escalating violence: offenders in the moment are unlikely to be deterred by changes in penalties.
Instead, Rees advocates prevention and better preparation: more security personnel, several days of de-escalation training for staff, and the option for attendants to skip ticket inspections if they judge a situation to be unsafe. Structural measures such as turnstiles at station entrances, which would reduce the need for onboard ticket checks, and lockable retreat or shelter rooms on trains — which are lacking on many services and have reportedly been removed from some — would also help. “I would rather be prepared for a dangerous situation that never happens than be unprepared when it does,” he said.
Deutsche Bahn’s new chief, Evelyn Palla, plans to convene a security summit in the coming days, inviting politicians from all 16 federal states, trade union representatives, police and regional transport providers to discuss concrete steps to improve safety for staff.
This article was originally written in German.