Analysis Of The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer

774 Words2 Pages

Hannah Ringeisen

12 November 2015

Period 4

The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, 11/12/15, 5-7 pm, Host: Wolf Blitzer

On the program The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, a developing story talks about the event in Virginia where a 46 year old man, Linwood Lambert, is tased multiple times by police officers. This report starts off with mentioning that the man was picked up early one morning after multiple 911 calls about noise complaints. After the police officers picked him up the officers realized that he seemed to be acting strange so they decided to take him to a local hospital for a mental health evaluation. The officers stated that he made comments about “murdering two people and putting their bodies in the ceiling”. Once at …show more content…

The man is then tased more times following this and the officers used force, all in order to get him to cooperate. Then, instead of taking the man to the hospital the officers take him to the police station after he has taken drugs, been tazed multiple times, and is bleeding because of breaking the door. Once they reach the police station, Lambert seemed unconscious in the back seat and pronounced dead when taken to the hospital, which medical examiners believe was after going into cardiac arrest. The report ruled the cause as “acute cocaine intoxication”, however the family blames the police for his death and file a 25 million dollar wrongful death lawsuit. They backed up their lawsuit by saying “the officers deprived him of the medical attention he needed and tasering him multiple times violated him of his constitutional rights to be free of cruel and unusual punishment”. In rebutle to this, the police have denied these accusations and stated that Lambert’s behavior required force to be used.To finish off the report, the reporter mentions how the South Boston Police department released a statement stating that they are strongly defending the case, and mentioned how the medical examiners …show more content…

I support this idea because the police officers were right near a hospital after they knew he was on cocaine, he was tased multiple times and he was bleeding yet they chose to risk all these injuries and take him to the police station. As police officers I believe they should have put the man’s health before his actions, and should have taken him into the hospital to get the medical care before being taken to the police station. However, there is another side to this report. This side is that it was the man’s fault for this event. In some ways this may true, for instance he chose to commit an illegal act and do cocaine, he also chose to break open a car door and run towards the hospital door. These following actions in some ways support how the officers handled the situation. The man, Linwood Lambert, would not cooperate therefore they believed that the only option they had was to use force. Now although this may not support why they chose to take him to the police station and not the hospital, it does support why the officers took such violent action. Overall, I believe that the man was not in the right frame of mind, due to the cocaine, and therefore could not control his actions which eventually got him killed. However, I continue to believe that the violence imposed on the man was

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