While I didn't expect a happy ending, especially after they said 'two down', I was keen to know which was alive, hence my immediate unhappiness about being left in the lurch.
I, too, felt it left the police in a particularly bad light. It sounded like they ended with an SAS-style raid and shot without thinking (why would the home owner, who had no gun and was simply in a locked room) be shot ?
Yes, there have been a small number of questionable police actions over the years, and some people have died. I have never ever tried to research the numbers of police visits where guns are believed to be in use, calling for an armed response, but when anyone is killed, under any circumstances, at the hands of the police, it is definitely big news in the media, so we must have had a dozen incidents in a dozen years ? (Or fewer?)
It seems to me to be a rare situation where someone is shot and killed, even when they have been firing at the police, so this seemed to me to be even more unusual, and having the unarmed 'bystander' apparently hit made it all the more 'false'.
Sorry, it's grim when anyone dabbles with guns and gets hurt, but that play seemed to be based on an unrealistic view of how the police react, and made it more depressing by the way it ended, leaving (me with) questions.