Don Lamb - Tenure As Sheriff

Tenure As Sheriff

Portrayed as a stereotypical bureaucrat, Lamb is shown to care more about the fact that he is Sheriff of Balboa County than he does with actually carrying out his responsibilities as sheriff. His actual competence as sheriff is generally very poor because Lamb is a firm believer in the notion that, in any criminal matter, the obvious suspect is always the person who committed the crime. Whenever an obvious suspect appears, Sheriff Lamb will quickly arrest the suspect with little to no effort spent trying to confirm said suspect's alibi.

Indeed, it has been implied on numerous occasions that his record at solving crimes without the aid of Keith and Veronica Mars is rather abysmal. However, it has been argued that statistically, crime has dropped in Neptune since Lamb assumed the position of Sheriff. While Lamb himself was the one who made that statement, it was not refuted by his chief critics Veronica and Keith Mars.

In spite of his flaws, Lamb does at his core attempt to be a good police officer. This was made most evident at the end of season one, when, without any arm-twisting from the Mars family, Lamb arrested Jake Kane for obstruction of justice after it was revealed that his manipulation of Lamb regarding Abel Koontz allowed the true murderer, Aaron Echolls, to avoid arrest.

Another example was the situation involving the Manning family and their abuse of their daughter, Grace. When Veronica Mars and Duncan Kane were caught in the Manning family home, after discovering the hidden prison cell that the Mannings locked their youngest daughter Grace in to punish her, Lamb was called in to arrest the two. As Lamb dragged the two out of the house, Veronica pleaded with her arch-rival to listen to her as she described the location of the hidden prison cell. After placing the two in his police vehicle, Lamb returned to the Manning home and following Veronica's information, discovered the cell. As he walked out, Lamb responded coldly towards Mr. Manning's claims of being a victim of Veronica and Duncan and left the house again. He then gets into his vehicle and after driving several blocks down the road, silently pulls over to the sidewalk and releases Veronica and Duncan from the car. He then returns to the Manning family's home and ominously parks his car outside their house, as if to scare the abusive Mannings with the fact that Lamb knows their secret, even if he was powerless to officially arrest them for child abuse, due to Veronica and Duncan's involvement in revealing the abuse tainting any sort of investigation of them.