ST. LOUIS — Inmates at the downtown jail held a 70-year-old guard hostage for more than two hours early Tuesday.

The guard was taken out on a stretcher about 2 ½ hours later and was treated for minor injuries.

City officials refused to release basic details about the incident, including how the inmates overpowered the guard and how many guards and detainees were involved.

“Due to security issues, we would not like to address staffing at this time,” Jennifer Clemons-Abdullah, the city’s corrections commissioner, said during a Zoom news conference Tuesday afternoon. Clemons-Abdullah wore a bulletproof vest inside an office during the Zoom, but she would not say why and only noted that she sometimes wears it.

Clemons-Abdullah said she was not aware of any weapons used during the incident.

Two detainees took the guard hostage during breakfast around 6 a.m., said Charles Coyle, interim director of public safety for the city. Around 8:20 a.m., the police department’s SWAT team removed the guard from the jail using “less-than-lethal force.”

The guard has worked at the jail for five years.

Clemons-Abdullah has come under fire in recent months from the city’s civilian jail oversight board in the aftermath of several inmate uprisings at the jail. Board members have complained she’s kept them from accessing records and other information to which they’re entitled, and they say she has kept them from touring the facility to investigate complaints.

The Rev. Darryl Gray, a prominent activist and a member of the oversight board, spoke outside the jail after Tuesday’s news conference. Accompanied by three of the other eight members of the board, Gray urged more transparency from the jail.

“That whole press conference, with all due respect, … was comical, to say the least — and tragic, to say the worst,” he said. “There were no answers.”

Gray argued that basic information like how many guards and detainees were involved should be released right away.

The oversight board said they requested a meeting with Clemons-Abdullah and asked to see surveillance video of the incident. Clemons-Abdullah confirmed in the briefing that officers were not wearing body-worn cameras, but that the department has bought them and will be “deploying them soon.”

Clemons-Abdullah said during the city briefing that the incident was “merely an operational issue, and has nothing to do with oversight.”

Gray pushed back on that notion and said operational issues and oversight are not mutually exclusive.

“Operations come under oversight,” Gray said. “And so, unfortunately, the commissioner wants to continue to dismiss oversight.”

Clemons-Abdullah noted two inmates who overpowered the guard have a “long history” of disciplinary issues and said she heard on the police radio that they were making demands for pizza.

Coyle and Clemons-Abdullah said investigators intend to apply for criminal charges against the inmates.

Kim Bell of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.