LES,
What is wrong with that incident? On the face it looks like overkill, but lets break it down based on what you posted...
Domestic dispute in a home turns bad when a gun is pulled by homeowner on a relative and violence is threatened - I think you can probably turn to gun handling rule #3, which he obviously had a target in mind.
Complaint is registered with police. Who knows what the content of the complaint was other than I can almost guarantee that it included the following: "He pointed a gun at us and told us he was going to kill us", "He has lots of guns".
Police are obviously going to respond (regardless of the "sleepy little neighborhood" tag, which often has just as bad of things going on there as the ghetto, it just looks nicer. Police are not going to respond to a guy threatening violence with a firearm with anything less than overwhelming capability, should it be needed.
They deploy in somewhat of a standard formation (team, snipers, negotiators, vehicle, etc). It's too late to try and go get something when bad shit is going down right in front of you. Homeowner may have multiple guns, his wife might get involved, he might take her hostage, who knows. Too many variables to just use a couple officers to go check it out.
They tried to get him to answer a cell phone. They deploy loudspeaker. They deploy throw phone. Obviously homeowner knew he screwed up and was trying to ignore his way out of the situation. That's not usually the best choice, especially when the police are going to arrest you for aggravated assault and there are known firearms involved (see above). So, in the interest of attempting to reduce the level of violence, they deploy tear gas through a window to flush them out. Probably the least violent thing they could then do with the least risk to themselves. They then surrender. No shots fired. Fire starts (those grenades get HOT!) which is promptly put out because its anticipated by the department. Medics on standby and probably did the decontamination from the CS (which the homeowners will be feeling every time they shake their clothes out).
Homeowner arrested for being stupid and pointing guns. Stupid girlfriend arrested for inciting stupidity (both charges made up but are the gist of the situation). IMHO, the above is a good example of restraint while also having the capability to respond quickly to a variety of situations. Seems like calmer heads prevailed.
The issues I have are when we do the same rollout for a bogus call and then instead of understanding the situation as Smyrna above obviously did, they bust in, destroy the house, shoot the dog, terrorize the family, realize it was bogus, and leave the family in a lurch and a legal mess. That's pisspoorpolicework because even based on a report, they didn't understand what was actually happening and that any call that comes in is not fully truthful and rational (because humans have a tendency to exaggerate to make the call more serious, etc.), but there is probably a grain of truth somewhere. This thread is full of those examples, and those are the departments, that I bet if you look, have a lot of other problems as well.
All of this is obviously IMO, and YMMV. Just my two cents based on the report above, which seems to come from a fairly neutral, unbiased reporter/source about what actually happened in the situation and how it was resolved.
Sorry for the long post, but I think we start to get excited when "sleepy little neighborhoods" have bad things happen and it shocks the community, where if you go 5 miles across the tracks, no one cares that the same thing is happening on a daily basis because it's "expected" there.
Standing by for shotgun blast