Police believe themselves to be at war. Not with one-off groups of armed bank robbers, per se, but with heavily militarized cartels and street gangs like MS-13. If an ordinary police unit knocked on the door of an MS-13 safe house, they'd probably be met with heavily armed resistance.
The problems here are numerous. First, because this was not a cartel safe house, and any degree of diligence sufficient to obtain a no-knock warrant should have made that clear -- which means that either the diligence process is broken, or it was subverted. Second, because very few houses in residential neighborhoods are gang hideouts, and the police are using the theoretical presence of armed gangs as broad, categorical pretext to militarize all of their SOPs, regardless of context, circumstance, degree of escalation, or suspicion of crime. Third, because the level of police militarization in general is growing alarmingly. You'd be hard-pressed to draw a clear distinction, either in armaments or in operational charter, between some of the most heavily armed SWAT teams in this country and small military units.
Stories like this one are not only outrageous; they are horrifying. I don't want to subject myself to recency or memorability bias. But I'd be very curious to see the stats on how many of these incidents are occurring for every SWAT operation that, say, takes down a real bad guy. I'm not in favor of banning SWAT operations altogether, so much as I'm of the strong belief that the "S" in SWAT should always stand for "Special." As in, we've been building a legitimate case for months on this location, and we have extraordinary reason to believe that extraordinary measures are called for.
Check out this case, which happened in my buddy's neighborhood:
http://hamptonroads.com/2010/01/ryan-frederick-loses-appeal-...
TLDR: No knock raid with officer trying to batter down door, guy inside with small amount of weed who had previously been robbed by armed intruders fires through the door and kills officer.
That's my suspicion.
Such hyperbole makes it harder to understand their position and hence to effect useful change.
So it's bad enough they're using military hardware, but then they're not even using it according to proper training.
The Police get all the "toys" but none of the training, or self control.
Just watch any SWAT raid then compare that to a true military RAID, the Control and restraint used by the military is vastly contrasted by the Uncontrolled and Free Firing of a Police Raid.
The police are very dangerous
That is your logic.
If you're looking for a small amount of drugs on a person who you aren't even sure is present in a single room with a whole pile of occupants including children and you start throwing flashbang grenades then you should be 100% culpable.
Stuff like that has no application in regular policing, definitely not in raids to arrest people on suspicion of some small time crime.
If you go after the hold-out of a nest of armed bankrobbers that have been spotted going into some warehouse then you could make a case for it but even then preferably only after they try to shoot their way out.
This is an absolutely ridiculous level of escalation in a residential area.