> 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 ma

> 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. Every jurisdiction is different with their procedure but in many, this is exactly what they do. They generally want to know where in the house the supposed gunman is, where the hostages are, where the best points of entry/escape are, etc. I get the impression that in this case, the victim saw police assembling outside his house and tried to investigate as they arrived on-scene, which caught them off guard.