Clearly the guy who made the false call committed murder and should be charged as such. However, there should also be civil and possibly criminal liability for

Clearly the guy who made the false call committed murder and should be charged as such. However, there should also be civil and possibly criminal liability for the officer and department. SWAT should be held to a far higher standard for weapons use when they have time to show up at a location in force, in full gear, with superior training, and take up a defensive position before starting the engagement, vs. what I'd expect of a solo officer encountering a suspect on the street. If you're in cover, with a team of other people also in cover, all behind rifles, wearing level III or IV hard armor, with massively overwhelming force, immediate medical support, and technology, you have time to wait to see if a furtive movement into a waistband is pulling out a handgun. Even if someone is reaching for a handgun, it's probably not going to be an aimed shot at the 4x3" or so of exposed target you're presenting at 10-25 yards, and you should be able to take your shot in 0.2 seconds or so from seeing the cue. And yes, this might increase the risk to SWAT officers by a small amount, but it's already a very low risk, so even doubling that risk, if it halves the higher risk to the public during SWAT callouts, is the correct choice. And it's probably more like doubling a very tiny risk while 100x reduction in risk to innocent people and halving risk to criminal suspects. The whole justification of giving these teams massive amounts of weapons, armor, and other equipment is so they'll have overwhelming force and will be able to apply more discretion. We don't want the fight between police and bad guys to every be anything close to "fair". It should be like an adult breaking up a couple of children fighting, where the goal is to avoid injuring them. There's a separate problem of SWAT being used for a lot of no-knock drug warrants and other stupid things, but the solution there is to decriminalize drugs and get rid of those searches.