The following one was highly suspicious and looked like a hit done by a swat team covered as a 'mistake'.
The US has a several hundred billion dollar revenue generating illicit drugs market, and that doesn't happen without alot of involvement from US agencies.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/tucson-swat-team-defends-shooting-i...
Absolutely. In fact - if swatting results in the death of a person, then the swatter should be charged with first degree murder.
The problem, however, is that the swatters are not always in the US, so even identifying the swatter can be quite difficult; let alone extraditing them.
Thus, the swat teams also need to, in one way or another, tone down their violent, no-knock raids.
In common law, if somebody is killed in the commission of a violent felony even if the death was unplanned, it's "felony murder". In most of the USA, "felony murder" is first-degree murder.
I wholly concur that a much greater burden of responsibility is needed. In so many situations, there is no substantial accountability and either someone's life or dignity is lost for no legitimate reason. Not good for citizen morale.
It depends on how many outwardly hidden death rooms there really are and how often the existence of these rooms is revealed by anonymous phone calls. You don't need much of a ratio there for urgent action against false calls to create more harm than the hidden death rooms.
And it doesn't have to be a binary choice; upon receiving notification of a hidden death room, the police could choose to investigate cautiously rather than escalating to extreme force. This will likely still have the effect of reducing the number of hidden death rooms without much risk of shooting innocent people in a raid.
Fundamentally, there is no good answer to that. Both options can result in lives lost. One is an active shooter being allowed to continue killing freely, the other is sending police officers ready to deal and face lethal force.
Obviously no-knock raids on suspected drug-dealers are a different matter - those are unacceptable by any sane metric. But you include swatting in your list. Swatting generally involves a violent emergency where delaying for verification would cost lives.
For that case, all I think we can do is treat the swatters as people committing aggravated kidnapping or even attempted murder. They're attempting to send men to detain somebody at gunpoint.