Beaten to Death in Broad Daylight: Germany Shocked by Brutal Commuter Train Murder

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Police are also calling on Deutsche Bahn to increase its security measures. Konrad Freiberg, head of the German police union GdP, complained in a letter to the national railway that in exchange for the ticket price rises it gives to passengers each year, they should also be given improved security.

Deutsche Bahn officials claim the national railway operates 3,200 cameras across Germany. This clearly pales in comparison to the highly monitored London Underground, for instance, where they have over 5,000 cameras in operation. In Tokyo passengers are monitored by 7,700 cameras and in Vienna there are around 1,200.

However, experts like Eric Töpfer, a political scientist and researcher at the Centre for Technology and Society at Berlin's Technical University, don't believe that more cameras would help. "Video cameras would not stop violent incidents like those in Solln. They are no good as a deterrent against these mostly young, mostly completely irrational perpetrators," Töpfer told SPIEGEL ONLINE. He said the politicians' suggestions were part of a "cyclical attempt on their part to create the impression there is some kind of cure-all."

Report: Surveillance Cameras Don't Work

Nils Zurawski of the Institute for Criminological Social Research in Hamburg agrees. He has studied video surveillance and he too believes the Big Brother approach doesn't always work. "The other problem is that not enough people are actually watching," he said. "Even when the cameras catch an incident as it happens, most of the time nobody even sees it." The security posts are not always occupied, he says.

The head of the German police union DPolG, Rainer Wendt, told SPIEGEL ONLINE: "We need a massive increase in security forces. Cameras without personnel are useless. They serve no purpose."

The experience in what is possibly the most surveilled country in Europe supports the German researchers' arguments. London reportedly has over 1 million cameras in operation. But it has not made that much difference. As a recent internal report from Scotland Yard noted, there is only one crime solved for every 1,000 surveillance cameras. Earlier this year a British Home Office report concluded that camera programs have a ''modest impact'' on reducing crime.

Political Grandstanding

So what is the solution? "Generally speaking we should be investing more time and money into the assessment of perpetrators and looking at their history and background rather than just their age," criminal psychologist Adolf Gallwitz from the police training college in Villingen-Schwenningen in the state of Baden-Württemberg told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "In Germany it still seems to be easier to put a bank robber in prison for a long time than it is to imprison someone who is repeatedly violent."

Earlier this week, the elder of the two teenagers who beat Dominik B. to death and who are now being held in police custody apologized to the victim's family. He said he deeply regretted the deed and he could not explain how he "blacked out" like this, his lawyer Gregor Rose said. "I didn't want the man to die," the perpetrator said through his lawyer. The public prosecutor wants to press charges of murder while the defendant's lawyer prefers involuntary manslaughter. The next step will be a psychological assessment of the defendants.

Meanwhile, at least one sociologist expressed anger over the knee-jerk reactions and political grandstanding following the murder of Dominik B. "Shock at this deed is completely justified," Ulrich Bröckling told the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. "But with all these populist suggestions being made (by politicians), the real sorrow and fear is being devalued." In situations like this, Bröckling suggests, "the politicians should keep quiet."

With reporting by Jörg Diehl and Annette Langer.

* Under German media law, it is common not to publish the last names of some suspected criminals and victims.

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