Anatomy of a SWAT screw up

This case is an excellent example of how it can happen.

• Police gain suspicion that someone is suicidal or mentally unstable from something totally innocuous like a good samaritan buying a ton of toys for needy kids. In other cases, it's the word of a career criminal (commonly called a confidential informant) against a stranger.
  
• Police assume that mentally unstable and/or suicidal people are seriously violent criminals in the making.
• Police make a single attempt to contact the person.
• Police make no attempt at further intelligence gathering, such as calling a cell phone or contacting immediate family members to confirm suspicions; this part is common to nearly all SWAT-related screw ups. Intelligence gathering is for pansies.
• Police converge, in overwhelming strength, on unsuspecting target who is more likely to think they're being personally treated to a real life Red Dawn scenario than being helped by the police or suspected of criminal activity.
• Police end up finding out the whole operation was a load of bullshit that, had their commanders possessed the common sense God gave a baby chipmunk, they might have avoided this debacle.
  

There's no faster way to cheer up someone with bipolar disorder than to aim a submachine gun at their head. The therapy goes even faster when you have a squad of men doing it. I believe the professional jargon for this in the psychology profession is "Shock and Awe Therapy."