A few years ago, the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe invested in a new advertising agency.
You wanted to be more popular in the city, with customers.
The result was the "#weilwillichlieben" campaign.
It should match the image of the capital: not perfect, but open, diverse and self-deprecating.
Just Berlin.
Anna Vollmer
Editor in the “Germany and the World” department.
Follow I follow
Not the Berlin, however, that some BVG passengers saw.
Last year, activists published a petition on the change.org platform in which they wrote: "Stop discrimination and violence by inspectors of the BVG and the S-Bahn Berlin!" It read.
Under the hashtag "BVGWeilWirUnsFear", various people on Twitter and Instagram reported sometimes drastic racist attacks during ticket inspection.
Just a few months ago, the story of yoga teacher Juju Kim went viral: she had published a video in which she accused BVG inspectors of breaking her finger after failing to see that a ticket she bought in the vehicle had, was not valid.
A control escalates
Another incident made it into the British weekly The Observer last Sunday.
There the story of the opera singer Jeremy Osborne could be read, which also didn't sound like the liberal image that the city of Berlin and its transport companies like to adorn themselves with.
Osborne told the Observer that he, a "person of colour", had never felt so unsafe in a city as in Berlin.
The BVG should also have something to do with this.
In October 2020, Osborne was stopped on the tube.
There are two versions of the course of this check.
Osborne, he tells the Observer, asked the plainclothes inspectors for their ID.
The situation then got out of hand.
They asked him to get out and then pushed him onto a metal bench outside.
An injury to his thigh that he sustained was treated in the hospital, says Osborne.
According to the Observer, the inspectors, who did not work for the BVG itself but worked for a subcontractor like about three-quarters of their colleagues, later reported the incident differently.
Osborne provoked her by showing his ticket "very slowly".
He also insulted the four men, three of whom were Turkish citizens, as "foreigners".
Osborne denies that.
Legal proceedings against the controllers
What exactly happened will now be clarified in court, because Osborne has sued the BVG.
It is the first case in which this is happening on the basis of the Berlin Anti-Discrimination Act, which came into force in June 2020.
However, it is not the first time that Berlin inspectors are on trial.
There have been problems for years.
In the past, Wisag employees who worked for the BVG were given suspended sentences for causing dangerous bodily harm, others for ripping off tourists and keeping the money for themselves.
At the request of the FAZ, Jeremy Osborne wrote that he did not want to go into the details of his personal case again.
The Observer reported everything correctly.
With his lawsuit, he wants to draw attention to a structural problem that affects not only him, but many people.
Other stories are worse than his.
In addition to Juju Kim, he also mentions Abbéy Odunlami, who was also treated in hospital in 2020 after being checked by the BVG.
"The problem of poorly trained, outsourced and underpaid security personnel has been reported for years," says Osborne.
These reports, such as an article on the Abbéy Odunlami case in the Berliner Zeitung, often mention the fact that, until recently, most of the inspectors were not in uniform.
It says there that who actually works as an inspector was completely non-transparent.
According to Odunlami, one had the feeling of being bullied by a gang.
The BVG has now changed this fact.
However, she does not want to comment on the current case.
When asked, she writes that neither discrimination nor violence is tolerated, and that internal and external employees are also taught this in regular training courses.
These training courses were intensified “also due to the cases currently being discussed”.
In addition, the inspectors are no longer in civilian clothes, but can be clearly recognized by their blue vests: "This measure has a de-escalating effect and is a result of our continuous exchange with passengers and initiatives." This exchange has now reached the next level with the court proceedings.