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OrphanWilde comments on Dark Arts: Defense in Reputational Warfare - Less Wrong
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Warning: Obvious non-libertarian response:
Because dealing with such things is part of their job, which (1) is valuable to society and (2) they are being paid to do in the expectation that they will, er, fucking do it.
If someone is able to make it credibly appear to the emergency services that there is an ongoing emergency, they need to respond. That is, after all, much of the point of having emergency services.
A more nuanced (and not particularly libertarian) version of your response is, I think, very reasonable: in some places, the US providing copious examples, the police are over-eager to respond to alleged emergencies with an immediate deployment of serious armed force, and are apt to be rather too trigger-happy when they do. It might be a very good idea for them to turn that down a few notches, in which case swatting would be less effective (hence maybe less tempting) and less likely to end in disaster. And maybe there are ways to verify reports more effectively without delaying rapid response when that's needed, though I'm not sure how.
But that's an entirely different matter from just not responding to apparent emergencies with what you take to be an appropriate level of force.
The issues are twofold: First, I don't think we'd disagree that a swat team is almost -never- an appropriate level of force. Second, anonymous phone calls are entirely insufficient evidence of an immediate emergency that would require that level of force.
So, if all you're saying is: "The mere fact of a single anonymous phone call should not produce a response of indiscriminately applied overwhelming force": yup, I agree.
If fixing that would be sufficient to make the swatting problem go away, then the problem is that I managed to underestimate the extent of the fucked-up-ness of the US police system. That wouldn't be a huge surprise, all things considered.
(And, having now actually read the article, it really does seem as if a single anonymous phone call can have pretty much that effect. That seems really bad. But I guess I don't know what sort of real incidents SWAT teams are used to deal with; perhaps, at least in some places, it's justified. If so, the best answer might be to come down heavily enough on people who abuse that system to stop them doing it.)
To be fare, it's a phone call that purports to be from the house being SWATed. It's just really easy to spoof the phone system.