If you ride on a German tram or bus....there's always the potential for an 'audit' (ticket-check). In an average year, I'll probably see around fifteen-to-twenty events where a review is carried out.
'Black' riders? The ones without tickets? I would say that this comes up at least once on every bus audit. A couple of years ago, I observed around six people caught on a single bus-ride who were riding without a valid ticket.
So it came up yesterday.....one giant control action across the entire city of Wiesbaden for almost eight hours. The bad-boy list? 150 people.
It was a curious event because it wasn't just the bus audit people involved....the city police accompanied them, along with the Hessen state riot police. With the cops on board the buses....if your ticket business failed, the cops got the second round.....they could frisk you. Normally, that's not part of the audit game.
So what did the cops find? Narcotics, and illegal pepper spray devices. Stolen IDs were also recovered.
A serious change in tactics? Well, the police numbers are going up and they've got plenty of man-hours to put toward public safety. The bus management folks are suggesting more of these operations will occur in the future, and the tolerance level is going to be pushed up a notch.
From a historical prospective, if you rode the Wiesbaden city buses in the 1980s, you just never noted someone riding without a ticket. On the railway system, you might have occasionally seen someone attempt a trip with no ticket. In the past decade, this 'black-rider' thing has gone radically up. The other odd aspect of this....a fair number of these audit episodes end up in a violent confrontation, and the 'black rider' thinks he'll just escape away. Oddly enough, if you watch these audits unfold....it's like a 90-percent male group on the violators. If you do see women on the violation side, it's always some 14 or 15 year old girl, who had the money from dad, but was attempting pocket it and ride freely.
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