The main point of this article is to report on an altercation between a patient and members of the NYPD ESU. This article came out at a time when the topic of police brutality was hot, and based on the context i believe this article was designed to attract readership because of that.
The stakeholders discribed in the film was the general population of Liberia. They had shared experiances of seeing the effects of ebola, innitially being in denial of its severity, then finally seeing the entire liberian public health system be overwhelmed and fail by an apparently unstopable and horrifying disease. The people effected needed to make difficult decisions about how to avoid contracting the disease, how to protect their families, and how to deal with the emotional strain placed on them by the epidemic.
Perspectives of public health officials, goverment workers (excluding the president), and international aid organizations such as doctors with out borders and the united nations (both of which are depicted), are not included in the film. More scholarly perspectives are also not included.
information for this article was obtained from an incident report submitted by the ambulance crew to FDNY administrators
This film is designed to have an emotional appeal. Very little scientific evidance is provided, and most of what we see are images and naratives about the effects of ebola from the public's perspective. Powerful images and stories, such as the death of a pregnant women on the side of the road, the closing of hospitals, and the turning away of patients are predominantly displayed. Much of this movie is told from the perspective of a student of the University of Wisconsin, and there was a large amount of dialouge about how he tried to get his family out of the effected zone. The only notable statistics given in the film was at the end, when the number of effected and the number of deaths were compared.
I feel that this film would be best suited for a general public, non-scholarly, audiance. While it provides great, compelling, emotional stories of first hand accounts of ebola, it does not look at the disaster from an objective, scholarly, perspective.
"The violence broke out when the patient spit at the Emergency Service Unit officers and swore at them. The officers responded by hitting him in the face, hauling him off the stretcher to the ground and then tossing him back on the stretcher, "
"After the first round of punches, the patient was "taken off the stretcher to the ground and restrained again, pt. was thrown by ESU again on to my stretcher," the EMT wrote. "Pt. sustained injuries to face and head," the report said."
The main arguement of the film is that the development of stable and adequite public health networks is as important to the greater good of the population as the prevention of civil war.
I researched more on the demographics found in the NYC 67th precinct, other police brutality related incidents taking place around the same time, and I looked at other New York Daily News articles related to police brutality to get a better understanding of the paper's bias.
I found the images of speaches by the liberian president to be out of place and not compelling. I also found the apparent lack of hard numerical and scientific data in the film to be offputting.