STANDOFF

On July 7, 2016, hundreds of protesters gathered in Dallas after the shooting of two black men—Philando Castile and Alton Sterling—by white policemen. One hundred Dallas police officers stood guard. At around 9pm, as the crowds began to disperse, a gunman opened fire into the line of officers from behind. Five were killed and a dozen more injured.

Four hours of negotiation followed, by Senior Cpl. Larry Gordon, a black 21-year department veteran, with the black gunman who had targeted white police officers. Gordon managed to buy the SWAT officers enough time to come up with a strategy to take out the shooter—one that was extremely controversial and unprecedented on American soil—and to implement it. Thompson's intimate portrait of these two figures' lives, as well as several other officers and family members, gets to the heart of the deeply pressing issue of race and policing in the United States.

STANDOFF is the first book on this event, illustrating the complicated sides to the exigent crisis of how law enforcement is influenced by race. Pulling from her on-the-ground reporting from Dallas for the Washington Post and her exclusive interviews with all relevant parties, Jamie Thompson deftly shows true empathy for every character in this story.

Jamie Thompson is an Edward R. Murrow Award-winning journalist who covered the Dallas police shooting for The Washington Post and wrote the exclusive account of the specialized unit, the Foxtrots, who lost three officers that night. She's a contributing editor for D Magazine and an associate professor of journalism at the University of Dallas. Her work has also appeared in The Dallas Morning News, Tampa Bay Times, and Texas Monthly, among others, and her work has won numerous state and national writing awards. She lives with her husband and two children in Dallas.