Wseizures are a type of threat. Continuing a conversation with an uncontrolled person could result in harm, and faced with such prospects many prefer to simply leave the upset to their own devices. This in turn may make it attractive for them to exaggerate their own outrage for the sake of its social deterrent effect.
Convicted dodgers are a good example of this. To avoid being punished, they like to give the unconscious, but persistent inspectors know that many of these angry people soon cooperate, whether it’s meekly ranting or begging for mercy. Of course, the risk of such professional persistence seems to be increasing recently, or at least one reads more and more often about passengers who qualified for arrest by the police by physically attacking the staff.
A Danish sociologist recently managed to persuade two teams of ticket inspectors to record their operations using body cameras. When evaluating this material, it was initially a question of differentiating between the different ways in which fare dodgers reacted. An important difference is whether or not the convicts recognize the authority of the controllers and the legitimacy of the sanction imposed.
When dodgers become abusive and violent
After the acknowledgment, many tried to invoke extenuating circumstances – either to show that they were an honorable passenger in front of the spectators or in the tacit hope of placating the inspectors. One person, who bought his ticket after the check had started, immediately presented further tickets from the same day without being asked and to demonstrate his general compliance with the law. A mother with three children, two of whom were too old to ride for free, said they were her own child’s playmates, whose ages she did not know exactly. A borderline case of this strategy is reached when the dodger stylizes himself as being innocent, i.e. claims a right to impunity due to special circumstances. Since he is already on the verge of denying the legitimacy of law enforcement officers.
Ticket inspectors wait for the entrance of a subway.
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Image: Ricardo Wiesinger
This attitude is adopted by fare dodgers who reject the role of the controlled they have been assigned, for example by ignoring the controllers or by expressing loud contempt for them and their institution. In such cases, it is important to change the mind of the rebelling passenger and, if this is unsuccessful, to hold him down until the police appear to take him away. The proximity to violence in these situations is obvious, and some dodgers seem to calculate that the inspectors would rather disobey their order than risk such an escalation.
A second evaluation of the video recordings, which also included interviews with the inspectors, shows that this calculation is not entirely unrealistic. Their starting point was the observation that angry fare dodgers are treated very unequally by the various inspectors of the same organization. Only one of the two teams examined behaved roughly as expected by the organization on its missions. According to the “philosophy” of these ruthless inspectors, every fare dodger deserves the same treatment. It would be unjust to charge only the meek and well-mannered for missing a ticket and let the blusterers run away with it. Furthermore, such a policy of public leniency could encourage viewers to imitate the loud and aggressive at the earliest opportunity. The rough touches that inspectors occasionally have to put up with when doing this are part of the necessary costs of enforcing the law.
The second group of inspectors behaved less courageously. Instead of risking ugly scenes, it was better to let the “promotion smugglers” get away with it. In particular, the behavior of this second group indicates that the prospect of violence has a similar effect as a bribery: parts of the audience turn to the personal interests of the staff to have their wishes fulfilled out of fear or joy, and fall by the wayside here like there the equality before the law and the central controllability of the organization.