Police were locked in negotiations Tuesday night with a man holding hostages inside a building that houses a Chase bank branch and school district office in the Southern California city of Bakersfield, officials said.

Officers responding to a call of a bomb threat arrived at the scene around 1 p.m. at the Chase Bank building in downtown Bakersfield, and discovered a man had barricaded himself inside “with several community members,” the Bakersfield Police Department said in a statement.

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