Can police officers be held liable for failing to provide emergency medical aid to an inmate who later took his own life?

[his] condition, call for medical assistance, administer CPR or do anything else to help, disregarded the risk facing [him] in a way that exceeded gross negligence."); Tlamka v. Serrell, 244 F.3d 628, 633 (8th Cir. 2001) ("[F]ailure to act given the patent nature of [the inmate's] condition, considering the officers' ability to provide CPR, is conduct sufficiently severe to evidence an Eighth Amendment violation.").

This court has previously held that officers' actions in failing to administer CPR to a prisoner did not necessarily amount to deliberate indifference. In Cartwright v. City of Concord, 856 F.2d 1437 (9th Cir. 1988), a pretrial detainee committed suicide while in city custody. Plaintiffs sued the officers and the city, arguing that the officers should have administered CPR during the five to seven minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive. Id. at 1438. We held that the officers were not deliberately indifferent because their "actions during the few intervening minutes between discovery of Cartwright - cutting him down, checking his vital signs, giving him aid - and the arrival of the emergency medical crews was not deficient." Id. (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Maddox v. City of Los Angeles, 792 F.2d 1408, 1415 (9th Cir. 1986) ("We have found no authority suggesting that the due process clause established an affirmative duty on the part of police officers to render CPR in any and all circumstances.").