Scenario:
You are the senior member of a two-man hostage negotiation
team for a maximum security facility in the Northeast. You and
partner are called to a cell block where an inmate, identified as
Alfredo Albondigas, has taken two facilities maintenance personnel
and a fellow corrections officer hostage. He is claiming that there
are aliens from another planet living in his cell block and
demanding that they leave immediately. He has given an ultimatum
that if he does not see the flying saucer leaving the exercise yard
area in 2 hours, he will kill the maintenance personnel that he has
taken hostage because he knows that they are giving signals to
the aliens about him and the other inmates.
Mr. Albondigas is armed with a handmade knife and has his
head wrapped in aluminum foil. The corrections entry reaction team
(CERT) is working with you has a green light to kill Mr.
Albondigas, but there are no current opportunities presenting
themselves. You have managed to get a throw phone into Mr.
Albondigas and you have direct phone communication with him. Also,
because of the phone’s design, when he hangs up, you can still hear
what is going on in the room. He has not hurt the maintenance
personnel so far, but he is using the corrections officer as a
translator to speak to the maintenance personnel, as if the
maintenance personnel were not speaking English, but some alien
tongue.
This scenario may seem humorous because it is fictional, but
if it were real, it would be very serious for both the hostages and
Mr. Albondigas. You are tasked by the warden and incident commander
to make an operations plan centered on dealing with this
mentally ill offender.
Address the following questions in a 10–12 page position
paper. Present this paper as if it were an operations plan to
negotiate with Mr. Albondigas and end the hostage standoff. You do
not need to plan the tactical response if the negotiations fail.
The paper presented should confine itself to gathering the
information that negotiator needs, and the approach to take when
negotiating with Mr. Albondigas to end the standoff.
Explain the mental state of the offender and the 2 most likely
mental illnesses that are affecting him.
Explain what type of medical personnel you would like to have
at the scene, and why?
Relate why you think that, if the deadline is reached without
a solution, whether Mr. Albondigas will hurt the maintenance
personnel or not. Explain your answer.
Articulate the persons whom you would like to have
brought to the scene for interviews to help with information
that you can use to talk to Mr. Albondigas.
Explain your approach as the negotiator when speaking with
Mr. Albondigas, and why you would take that
approach.
It is critical that, when you make a statement of fact in your presentation, you cite the reference that you used to obtain the information from. Do this in the text of the paper, and then include the reference in your References page. As always, your paper will be submitted in the current edition of APA format. No abstract is required because this is a short position paper, but a title page, reference page, and appropriate running header with page numbers are necessary.
