In Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse and Saarland, a Taser is already part of the standard police equipment. Special forces have been using them for more than 20 years. The police in NRW have been testing the stun gun since the beginning of 2021 in Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Düsseldorf and in the Rhein-Erft district, and now another 14 authorities are being equipped. One of them is Bonn. For the time being, 153 officers on shift work in Bad Godesberg and the city centre police station will be allowed to carry the DEIG. This is equivalent to about 95 per cent of the staff there. They have all undergone a three-day training session practicing possible scenarios. Next year, the station at the police headquarters in Ramersdorf, the Gabi station and the locations in Bornheim and Meckenheim will follow.

So far, police officers have four tools at their disposal to stop an attacker or resolve a dangerous situation: their hands, the baton, irritant gas and a gun. It is up to them what they use - but there are framework conditions that are laid down by law and which they learn in their training. For example, they must always consider whether the use of weapons is proportionate to the situation. But there are also very practical limitations. For example, irritant gas often has a poor effect when someone is very high on adrenaline. For DEIG, the rule is that it should not be used if the other person is old, physically frail, pregnant or appears to be younger than 14. According to the police, the risk of injury is nevertheless low. There are no complications even with pacemakers.

The Taser is intended to expand the scope of intervention, although it is not seen as a substitute for the gun. An officer who is attacked with a knife should continue to draw their pistol. In general, the DEIG is not designed for "dynamic situations", as police jargon puts it. Take a knife attack, for example: if the attacker is running back and forth, you can easily miss them with a Taser. And if the Taser does not knock them down, you have too little time to draw your gun.

The State Police Headquarters (LZPD), say the trial has worked well in the past months. They concluded: "The deterrent effect of the DEIG is very great, so that it is usually enough to just threaten to use it." In about 80 per cent of the cases, officers merely had to draw the conspicuous black and yellow electric pistol and not actually fire it.

This is partly because they can flex their muscles. Like a kind of warning shot, they can press a button where the DEIG does not fire, but only produces a bright flash on the gun. The most impressive thing about this is the loud rattling sound that the flash makes. This mode is also designed to stun someone at close range by placing the taser on them.

The gun can be fired in a close-range and a long-range mode, and you can switch between the two in seconds. The two darts that discharge from the weapon hook into clothing or skin, after which 50,000 volts flow through the thin wires. This allows the current to penetrate even the thickest winter jacket of up to five centimetres. Ideally, the subject is paralysed for the five seconds during which the current flows and the police officers can arrest them without their being able to resist. Each DEIG has two cartridges that can be fired. After that, they need reloading. In Bonn, officers carrying a DEIG must attach a bodycam to their jacket.

The Taser is meant to stop attackers and resolve threatening situations quickly and with as few consequences as possible, Hoever explains. "Compared to the two previous years, the numbers of colleagues injured on duty in 2021 rose sharply. We hope that the DEIG, as an instrument of danger prevention, will make perpetrators refrain from violence against emergency forces," says Andreas Koch, head of the danger prevention directorate of the Bonn police. Last year, 136 police officers were injured in the line of duty, compared to 91 in 2019. And the number is also high this year: 129 incidents were recorded by November.