You know that shooters have the ability to stay quiet, right? A calm atmosphere doesn’t mean there isn’t someone who is in imminent danger. Back to the thought exercise: you’re a hostage, you call 911, police arrive. Then they wait five minutes and fuck off because nobody’s firing at them or shouting threats. Do you think that’s reasonable? Wouldn’t you want them to breach the house and get you out of the situation?

It’s fucked up that this happened in the first place, but “well, the police should have…” is not how you fix it. Misuse of emergency resources needs to be a federal crime, and doing it to harm another person needs to be investigated and penalized as attempted murder with prison sentence for first time offenders, both as punishment and as a deterrent. But I’ve seen enough court cases to understand that the US justice system has neither the motivation nor the competence to implement or enforce a law like that.