German Railway Equips 2,000 Staff with Bodycams Following Colleague's Killing

The murder of a train attendant in February 2026 has pushed Deutsche Bahn to accelerate a long-planned safety measure. Starting today, about 2,000 employees working on long-distance services — including ticket inspectors, onboard catering staff, and lounge personnel — receive wearable cameras designed to deter and document assaults.

Serkan Çalar, a Zugbegleiter, was fatally attacked while on duty, an event that became the tipping point. The company's passenger rail chief Evelyn Palla had already pledged to eventually equip all customer-facing staff across regional and long-distance trains as well as at stations. Now the first batch of cameras arrives as part of a broader accord involving the federal government, German states, unions and the transport sector.

The use of bodycams is voluntary, and workers must complete training on technical operation, legal requirements, and the obligation to clearly mark that a camera is active before any recording begins. The group works council has welcomed the voluntary nature of the deployment.

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Deutsche Bahn is coupling the bodycam rollout with other measures under what it calls an action plan. Two hundred additional security personnel are being hired, emergency call buttons for employees are being technically upgraded, and video surveillance at stations is being expanded.

Data protection rules are strict, reflecting a legal framework that permits only incident-triggered recording. The cameras are switched on only after a staff member announces that a conflict is being filmed. Currently the devices capture image material only; a test phase for audio recording is scheduled for the third quarter of 2026, pending legal approval. All data is stored encrypted and automatically deleted after 72 hours unless the federal police need it for an investigation.

"The use is permissible only on a case-by-case basis in escalation moments," emphasised Professor Dr. Alexander Roßnagel, a data protection expert. DB board member Michael Peterson acknowledged that long-distance travel is fundamentally safe but called the cameras "another building block" to de?escalate tense situations. The need for such tools is underlined by the railway's own figures: more than 3,000 assaults on employees were recorded in 2025.

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