Standoff counts down the minutes of July 7, 2016, the punishing summer night when a lone gunman waged war on police amid a
Black Lives Matter rally in downtown Dallas. That night, protesters, moved by the recent murders by police of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, marched in
cities across the nation to demand policing reforms and accountability. Dallas
police were monitoring the city’s peaceful protest when a black, young man in a bulletproof vest, armed for battle, murdered five officers and
wounded eleven other people.
A chaotic gun battle in the streets
moved into a downtown community college,
where police cornered the shooter. As a negotiator tried to talk down the
gunman, whose cause was sick vengeance for racial injustice in America, the SWAT team armed a robot with a bomb, directed it to the gunman, and blew him to bits.
The author of Standoff, Jamie Thompson, cycles chapters through perspectives—on events and on the issues—from the officers, from family, protesters, a doctor, and the police chief and
mayor—people whose lives changed that night.
Aside from the negotiator, who is
black, the officers, in Thompson’s telling, all have the colorless
view that police decisions should not be questioned—and the officers’ views are the ones most frequently expressed in Standoff. The officers are also portrayed as heroic or
tragic. They were.
Note: Jamie Thompson won an Edward R. Murrow Award for
excellence in writing for her coverage of the gunman’s ambush of Dallas
police in July 2016. Thompson originally covered the shooting for The
Washington Post and later wrote about it for The Dallas Morning News. She has
also contributed to D Magazine, Texas Monthly, and the Tampa Bay Times.
