Aggression at the stations and on the trains has increased in the past year. In order to be able to take better action against this, the NS is calling on the Ministry of Justice and Security to give special NS employees of Safety & Service extra powers. This also has to do with the hardening in society, says the rail operator, who wants to meet with the police, among other things, to tackle the problem.
Last year, the NS reported 744 incidents involving aggression. In 2020 there were 661 and in the corona-free year before that 678. NS has about 700 employees at Safety & Service who also have boa authority. In total, they came into action more than 3 million times in 2021. According to the NS, that is considerably more than the 2.5 million from a year earlier.
The number of incidents reported between passengers also increased by 20 percent to 2300. And more NS employees were involved in some form of aggression. 186 of them were even injured. This involved minor injuries in 87 percent of the cases.
“We see that some travelers have a shorter fuse in times of corona, which fits in with a trend that we see more widely in society,” says responsible board member Eelco van Asch. He indicates that in the course of the year, “some of the travelers were ‘unclear’ about the corona measures, which sometimes led to discussions”.
In order to be able to act more quickly, the NS wants the specially trained employees to be able to determine the identity of someone from now on. The police must now be called for this. “The sooner you know who you have in front of you, the less quickly a situation can get out of hand,” said the NS, which also advocates that employees can act across the border on the international Intercity between Amsterdam and Brussels.
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