Violence on trains –
How SBB trains against aggressive travelers
Faced with increasing excesses, controllers receive one-day training. Here’s what we learn there. And this is why the CFF prevention campaign is off to a bad start.
Posted today at 7:28 p.m.
Here are the first actions taught to a controller who has just been insulted: take a step back and say stop with your hand and voice.
KEYSTONE/Peter Klaunzer
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- The SBB trains its staff to deal with attacks from travelers.
- YourPower teaches self-protection and communication techniques to controllers.
- The SBB equips the transport police with cameras to deter violence.
- A motion proposes electric guns for the transport police.
“Get out, asshole!” This is what a train controller can sometimes hear when he asks an irascible passenger for his ticket. And that’s not all. “The attacks on our staff are becoming more and more crude,” said Linus Looser, senior manager in the SBB Passenger Division. “There are around ten of them per day. This includes insults, insults, threats and physical attacks.”
The CFF does not intend to let its staff cope as best they can in the face of these verbal or physical attacks. They introduced one-day training courses to learn how to respond and calm the situation as much as possible. And this without ever putting yourself in danger. Easier said than done.
YourPower in charge
What does this look like, practically? Well, we could see it this Monday morning at the state-of-the-art SBB Training Center in Löwenberg, near Murten. In charge for the practical exercise, the company YourPower. Trained by former police officers, it has been providing courses for twenty years in sectors as diverse as hospitals, service stations, prosecution offices, etc.
Here we go. The scene takes place in the basement of the training center with a room converted into a train car. Slumped on the bench seat, a beer in hand, cap screwed on his head, a passenger takes a dim view of the arrival of the controller Eugénie Guédat. She is a real controller, he plays the role of the bad guy.
Slumped on the bench seat, a beer in hand, cap screwed on his head, a passenger takes a dim view of the arrival of the controller Eugénie Guédat. All this under the gaze of the media.
KEYSTONE/Peter Klaunzer
“Get out of there,” he tells her when she asks for her ticket. What does the controller do after being coached? First, she immediately takes a step back to gain distance from her attacker. Then she clearly said “Stop!” with hand and voice. And she immediately goes on to ask him the reason for his aggression.
Don’t take risks
The scene ends with the bad sleeper kindly showing his ticket and the conductor thanking him while keeping him in the corner of her eye as she walks away. “What if he had persisted and been threatening,” one asks? There, the answers are evasive, because the CFF does not want to reveal all their tactics. We therefore assume that the inspector would not insist and would call the transport police or the police altogether. The main thing anyway is that she doesn’t take any risks.
Kaspar Keller, YourPower’s head of training, plays the role of controller and shows how to react to an aggressive passenger.
Keystone
Eugénie Guédat believes that this training course was very useful to her. “Our goal is really to give staff the tools to manage a delicate situation based on situations taken from reality,” explains Markus Atzenweiler, the founder of YourPower. “There’s a mix of self-protection, tactics and communication.”
Faced with the increase in attacks, the CFF has also taken several measures to improve security. Since 1is September, they equipped transport police throughout Switzerland with body cameras. This should help to calm down the excited people, if they know they are being filmed. Another measure: from 10 p.m., controllers always work in pairs on all mainline trains.
In the future, electric guns
Another measure, more drastic, could appear in the future against violent and dangerous travelers: the taser. A motion from national councilor Michaël Buffat (UDC/VD) is in fact on the verge of being widely accepted by parliament and the Federal Council. She calls for the transport police to be equipped with stun guns. The idea is to be able to face a threatening man who, for example, is brandishing a knife.
But we know that prevention is better than cure. This is why the SBB is launching an awareness campaign in the coming days for respect and safety on trains. Under the slogan “Traveling together with respect”, a poster shows a cactus man and a character made of balloons. We recognize neither the controller nor the traveler. “We did not want to reproach anyone or stir up fears,” explain the CFF…
The poster for the prevention campaign against attacks on trains is incomprehensible.
CFF
It is doubtful whether this campaign will be effective. The message is totally diffuse and incomprehensible. We cannot on the one hand clearly complain about the increasing violence against CFF personnel and on the other hand carry out a light and supposedly humorous prevention campaign with cacti and balloons.
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