When Larry Gordon meets with law enforcement officials to discuss public safety initiatives in downtown Dallas, they often tell him they already know who he is.
“For them, I’m still the SWAT guy, the negotiator,” said Gordon, laughing.
Gordon, a law enforcement veteran of 27 years who retired from the Dallas Police Department in 2022, served as a SWAT negotiator during the July 7, 2016, ambush, placing him at the center of one of the most consequential nights in modern law enforcement history.
The Dallas ambush left five police officers dead: Dallas Police Senior Corporal Lorne Ahrens, Officer Michael Krol, Officer Patricio Zamarripa and Sergeant Michael Smith, and Officer Brent Thompson with the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART). Nine officers and two civilians were injured.
The shooting was the deadliest incident for police in the country since the 9/11 attacks. It was also the first time that police used a robot, equipped with a bomb, to kill a suspect.
The victims, the shooter and the robot have come to define the collective memory of the Dallas police shooting. Gordon’s poise was crucial during the four hour standoff. A senior corporal and crisis negotiator on the Dallas SWAT team at the time, Gordon engaged the shooter, Micah Xavier Johnson, in dialogue. His actions on the second floor of El Centro College Building B bought police leadership critical time to develop a strategy and likely saved lives.
“When you are involved in a critical incident, time gets distorted,” Gordon said in an interview with Police1. “For me, it went by very, very quickly, in part because of the fear.”
Typically, during a crisis, the negotiator is in a safe room talking with the suspect over the phone. This was different. Gordon’s SWAT team was gathered in a narrow hallway, separated from the shooter by only about 30 feet and drywall. The shooter was secured behind a corner, firing an AK-74 rifle at the officers.
“We didn’t know what his plan was, so I kept moving as I was talking,” said Gordon. He did this to make it harder for the shooter to fire at the sound of his voice.
A peaceful rally turned into an active shooter event
The shooting started toward the end of a peaceful Black Lives Matter rally where 800 demonstrators marched through downtown Dallas after the police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile outside Minneapolis. About 100 police officers were deployed to monitor the rally.
Around 9 p.m., Johnson, an African American Army Reserve veteran who had served in Afghanistan, parked his SUV near the college campus. He stepped out and opened fire on groups of police officers and protesters. Three officers were killed in the initial gunfire. Chaos erupted in the streets. Johnson made his way to the second floor of Building B, still firing at officers as he was hiding near the college library.
Cellphone video of that night captured waves of panic sweeping through downtown Dallas: crowds running for cover, officers scrambling to block intersections while trying to shelter from the gunfire. Body camera footage, released in 2021 following an open records request, shows shaky, grainy images of SWAT operators moving through concrete stairwells, crouching in a narrow hallway, exchanging hand signals. Some images glow with the eerie green hue of night vision filters. There are the sounds of emergency sirens echoing through the building, radios crackling, officers whispering commands. And then there are excerpts from the chilling exchange between the negotiator and the gunman.
Crisis negotiation: Finding the “hook” during a deadly standoff
When Johnson was cornered in the hallway by officers, he fired his rifle, shouting “Black supremacy! Black liberation!” Asked for his name, he referred to himself as “X.” He told Gordon he was furious about white police officers killing Black men. Investigations into Johnson’s online activities later revealed his interest in Black nationalist groups such as the New Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam and the Black Riders Liberation Party.
Gordon said his being African American became what crisis negotiators call the “hook,” the point of connection that opened the door to communication. At first, Johnson grew angry when Gordon used the term “bro.” He refused to believe the officer was Black.
“Once I convinced him, the conversation flowed,” Gordon said. “And we talked for four hours straight with little silence in between.”
There was another thing that Gordon remembered. The night before the shooting, he had a long phone conversation with his niece who was upset about police violence against Black Americans and the protests that swept the country. “It was almost the same conversation I had a day later,” said Gordon. To him, being a man of faith, it felt like God had prepared him.
Reports following the shooting suggested Johnson had struggled with mental health issues. In an interview with CNN, then-Dallas Police Chief David Brown said that throughout much of the standoff, Johnson appeared delusional, “playing games, laughing at us, singing, asking how many did he get.”
To Gordon, Johnson seemed “very lucid, very sane, very determined.” He may have had some mental health problems, Gordon said, “But I find that simply calling someone crazy is dismissive of their motives.”
When empathy becomes a tactical tool
When he encountered Johnson in the second-floor hallway of El Centro College, Gordon had already been an experienced crisis negotiator. But during the night of July 7, he remembered it was challenging to remain calm and keep his emotions in check.
When he heard the first “officer down” call in his patrol car earlier in the evening, he rushed to the scene and into the building, but he didn’t have the full picture until hours later. “I knew officers were shot. I knew it was bad. I just didn’t know how bad it was,” he said.
While he was walking the hallway negotiating with the shooter, a fellow SWAT officer kept holding a cellphone to his face as more information about the shooting trickled in, and Gordon learned that officer after officer after officer had died.
At one point, he was about to slap the phone out of his colleague’s hand but caught himself, Gordon remembered. As a crisis negotiator, showing empathy and staying rational is key, he said.
“And it was very difficult to show empathy, because I knew he killed officers,” he added. “He could have killed my best friend.”
It turned out that Gordon personally knew none of the officers killed that night. “But we are still a big family. And to me, they are heroes. They made the ultimate sacrifice.”
For several hours, Gordon tried to get Johnson to turn himself in. At one point, the negotiator offered the shooter an opportunity to speak with TV crews to get his story out.
To this day, every word of Johnson’s answer is etched into Gordon’s memory.
“I’ve said enough with this rifle,” the shooter replied. “The talking is over. It’s time for revolution, brother.”
Buying time when surrender is unlikely
That was the moment when police chief Brown made the decision to send an armed robot into the building with the sole purpose of killing the gunman, a strategy Brown was later criticized for by some civil liberties advocates, arms control groups and legal experts.
It was the right call, said Gordon, because the situation was getting more volatile. Johnson may have charged officers again, potentially putting more lives at risk, he said.
“Once you’re hearing the resolve in a person’s voice, you know they’re not going to give up,” Gordon said. Johnson came to die that night, he added, and police needed to stop him before he could take more people with him.
Gordon kept talking with Johnson, asking open-ended questions that required the shooter to elaborate. He was buying time for his colleagues to get the robot into position.
After the device detonated, killing Johnson and destroying the drywall and surrounding area, relief washed over Gordon. He went to look at Johnson’s body because he felt it was what he needed to do to get closure.
“I had to see who this person was. And as I looked at him, I was thinking, this is not a monster. This is just a guy,” he said.
The city of Dallas and the police department offered mental health support for their officers, but Gordon said he didn’t tap into any of the services. He probably should have, he said. “But I am not aware of any SWAT guy who has done it,” he added with a thin smile.
For several months after the shooting, he struggled with insomnia and found himself drinking more than usual just to get some sleep. He was also haunted by a recurring nightmare in which Johnson entered his room, and he was unable to reach his gun.
Eventually, sleep returned and the nightmares went away. To this day, he struggles to relax and tends to be hypervigilant at times. “But that’s probably more of a cop thing than a critical incident thing,” he said.
The question of “why”
After retiring from the Dallas Police Department as a sergeant, Gordon transitioned into corporate security. He now serves as chief of public safety and field operations for Downtown Dallas Inc. He still thinks about the night of the ambush, and often thinks about why the shooter did what he did.
“And I am wondering: Am I missing something as a police officer?” he said. “Did my own actions contribute to some of the anger against police out there?”
Occasionally, Gordon teaches classes at the police academy, and he always reminds his students that being a police officer comes with great power and great responsibility. “And you can’t be flippant about that,” he said.
