By Police1 Staff
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Police TASERed a pregnant woman and her boyfriend after they began fighting an officer.
Cell phone video that was posted on YouTube — in which the woman says she is eight-months pregnant — left some questioning whether excessive force was used and the necessity of their actions.
However, Cliff Buscher, deputy chief of criminal investigations for the department, told Daily RFT, “Everything they did at this point that we’ve reviewed so far in reports and even in the video, they were within department guidelines.”
Lucinda White, 29, and her boyfriend Frederic Thomas, 31, had called police to report a minor car accident in a Best Buy parking lot. When the driver of the second vehicle denied any wrongdoing, Thomas became non-compliant with officers, assaulting them, according to KSDK 5.
Officers reportedly used an ECD on both White and Thomas after she jumped in, after asking them to lay face down on the ground.
“Her and her boyfriend were both actively fighting with an officer and they used the force that was necessary to affect the arrest,” Buscher said.
White claimed it was her boyfriend she was touching, and not the officers, saying “I know not to touch a police officer.”
Buscher told media that police drive stunned White in the thigh, meaning the pain did not affect other areas.
“Our policy is, we would try to avoid it if at all possible mostly because not the TASER itself but the secondary, the fall. We don’t want somebody falling and hurting their self or their baby,” Buscher said.
White and Thomas were released from jail Sunday evening on $350 bond, according to the article.