Sgt Mendoza, I’ve been in the game over twenty years and most of it was in the transportation unit, your senario seems a little gray, however the first thing is to eliminate the officer to do head count in the back of the vehicle, head counts should be perfomeed prior to entry, this should be in writting with your procedure manual. Once the gate is locked, the gate never opens until in a secure area, Sallyport, or if in the street, deploy a perimeter of officers. Medical staff should be called in if possible, because injuries will occur. Your personnel should be trained never to open the gate in transit, inmates will saciface another inmate in order to get the transport officer to open the gate. If a hostage is ever taken, no matter the rank, they have no bargan authority, if your department has a negotion officer, summon him/her. Gasing the entire bus may give you future liability problems, such as who has a severe case of asthma, heart conidition, etc, for the staff as well as the inmates and the law suites would be coming. You must determine if the hostage takers have weapons, this will let you know what kind of force you will use or how soon to make a force entry. you may want to utilize rubber bullits instead of gas or just strave them out, the choices are many, you get the picture. Hope this 411 can help you

I was recently put in charge of my facilites CERT team. I work for a private correctional facility in Texas and the trainning lets just say is not to where I think it needs to be. I used to be on a Marine CQB team and training is very diffrent there than with at CERT team. I am trying to conduct a bus assault scenerio with my CERT team and having alot of questions on what would be the best approch to do so. If there are any suggestion please let me know.

—Scenerio- Officers are getting ready to transport inmates from facility to court or to another facility. An unarmed officer makes his way toward the back of the bus to conduct a headcount. Two or more inmates take the officer hostage. Now the CERT team is deployed to take back the officer and the bus. My first thought when thinking of this drill was to gas the entire bus and restrain everyone which is a given. But when i pitched the idea to my assistant warden he said it was a great idea yet he want diagrams and written out procedures on how this would be done. If anybody has conducted this type of trainning before please help me out, and just be mindful that this is taking place inside the facility and no type of fire arm can be used.

Respectfully Sgt. Mendoza