I think the GP's point might be that the problem is not so much that someone called SWAT on people, leading to their deaths, but rather that the response infras

I think the GP's point might be that the problem is not so much that someone called SWAT on people, leading to their deaths, but rather that the response infrastructure of our current police sytems leads them to enter a residence with what turns out to be excessive force. SWAT was originally intended to be used for "special" situations, and increasingly (over the past few decades) has been the go-to tool for many police-citizen interactions. If I were playing video games, and my front door exploded and the entryway were flashbanged, my first response would probably be relatively instinctive (get up, maybe to see WTF is happening in my house), and it's _very probable_ that such responses would make the breaching officers fearful enough that they'd shoot me. I don't have any weapons in my house, have no intention of resisting any police action, but the fact that I might stand up out of my chair, or move, or who-knows-what could easily be misconstrued. In the article, they said that the man had "reached for his waist" -- I literally do that every time I get up from my computer chair. I'd much rather that the police did some kind of surveillance first ("oh, hey, looks like a dude playing video games ..."), and verified that the situation matched the emergency described in their dispatch. This isn't intended to detract from the badness of the SWAT-ter's actions: I hope that (if he indeed caused this) there's some serious consequences. However, it would have been a lot more difficult to cause such mayhem if the police were less trigger-happy.