Re: I would also suggest the police force
They're becoming increasingly too heavy on the muscle and too light on the brain side.
Yes. One of the many ill effects of police militarization is that it creates a classic exploitable asymmetry. Any competent security researcher could have pointed that out when police forces in the Americas and elsewhere started jumping on the paramilitary bandwagon (and no doubt many did).
Schneier told a story some years back: When he was a kid, he got one of the Ant Farm kits sold by a US company named Uncle Miltie. Since you can't put live ants in a box on a toy-store shelf and expect them to remain useful very long, the Ant Farm comes with a postage-paid postcard. You fill in your address and Uncle Miltie posts you a tube of live ants.
So Bruce and his friends quickly realized this meant that, for the price of an Uncle Miltie Ant Farm, they could have live ants mailed to the victim of their choice, anywhere in the US.
It's a classic amplification attack: small cost to the attacker, greater cost to the defender. SWATing is just a nastier version of the same principle. The same can be said of witchhunts and other forms of using asymmetries presented by the authorities or the private sector.
The only ways to alleviate asymmetric-amplification attacks are raising costs for the attacker or lowering them for the defendant, either of which reduces the asymmetry. Prosecution can raise the attacker's cost (by increasing risk and penalties), but it has at best a mixed record. Lowering the defendant's costs can be achieved by reducing the effects the attacker can produce - less police paramilitary stupidity, in this case - and by compensation (which, if it came from the police force in question, might also have the salutary effect of reducing stupidity).1
There are other measures that might improve the situation, but they all boil down to reducing the asymmetry in some fashion. And, of course, some ways of reducing the asymmetry don't help, on the whole - arming potential SWATing victims with tanks and flamethrowers would reduce the asymmetry but even in the US relatively few people think that's a good idea.
1Here's the point where someone complains that this would hobble the police, who with their military-surplus equipment and adrenaline-fueled raids are "keeping us safe". Statistically, that is of course complete bullshit, and I'm not inclined to engage it.