Standoff: Race, Policing, and a Deadly Assault That Gripped a Nation

Tensions boiled over during the summer of 2016 as activists and others took to the streets nationwide to protest the police shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. On July 7, Dallas-area activists planned to protest by marching through the downtown area of the city. By the end of day five, police officers lay dead with several wounded, shot while on duty by a gunman armed with a semiautomatic rifle. In her first book, Thompson, who covered this story for the Washington Post and the Dallas Morning News, takes readers inside the gun battle, which raged over Dallas streets and ended, hours later, with the death of the gunman inside a local community college from an improvised bomb fashioned by Dallas SWAT explosives experts. Thompson conducted in-depth interviews, and reviewed numerous documents and hundreds of hours of camera footage to assemble this detailed account of the tragic events. She explores the thoughts and feelings of the SWAT team members, giving their perspectives greater depth and clarity, while placing the events in their proper context.