Having just spent 10 hours on a jury, I'm very fact-focused right now.
An earlier post mentioned a gun. Neither the news report or Will Grigg's blog entry mentioned a gun that I can see/hear.
The news report stated "she threatened them with a weapon".
Was the gun stated, and I missed it, or was it deduced from the facts that A, "she threatened them with a weapon" and, B, she was shot to death?
If she had a gun, there is a threat of grievous bodily injury to the officers. If she had a frying pan, this is not likely to be the case, though the facts are quite slim.
One thing that does strike me, however, is that the SWAT team was called out. If an officer is making a welfare check, does he not go to the doors windows of the address at which he is making the check (i.e. he is close enough to see any visual evidence of an immediate threat)? If so, and she made the threat while the officer was in close proximity, why didn't the first officer shoot her?
There may be a good reason, but if she wasn't an imminent enough threat to the responding officer(s) that they draw on her, why was the situation escalated?
Based on the slim information to this point, especially the officer stating they wanted to get her "the help she needed", this is likely a case of someone with a mental illness. Anecdotally speaking, the police are very well trained to respond to criminal behavior, but not at all well trained to respond to situations in which there is a medical or psychological issue at play. I understand that they have to respond to the stimulus presented in the moment and they are not trained doctors or psychologists. However, I think tragic outcomes such as this could be avoided if police were given training ( I know, more tax dollars ) to better identify the "abnormal" cases and back off a step (if the danger is not imminent) and call in those with the training to try to de-escalate the situation.
Maybe they tried it in this case, maybe they didn't. The facts as presented are simply too thin to know.
I will say that the increased propensity for local police forces across this nation to resort to their para-military forces over what seem to be lesser and lesser threats is an undeniably disturbing trend. This may or may not be another case in point. Only time will tell.
Required in service training for Indiana LEO's includes dealing with persons with mental problems-every single year.