[lightbyte]

>They thought they were dealing with a highly dangerous situation and individual.

Are you saying hearsay from a random citizen is probable cause to go kill someone? If that's the case than the police may as well advertise themselves as the cheapest and easiest to use hitmen in the country.

[zaphar]

I am in no way excusing the kansas officers here. However this does bring up an interesting point. To properly answer the question about "hearsay" you would need to find out what percentage of 911 calls with details indicating a need for a SWAT team are hoaxes. If the percentage is sufficiently low then the officer may well have been primed by previous experience to expect specific things during the call.

When someone is used to working with accurate information and is then fed inaccurate information from that same source then you can predict the results pretty accurately.