It is almost inconceivable that in the UK or indeed Europe this scenario would have been played out at the end of a gun. The more violent and drug ridden a society is then I guess the more likely it is that this will happen, as every suspected offender will be assumed to be carrying firearms and prepared to use them. The more extreme the law enforcement agencies' reactions to an incident then the more reliable their intelligence should be. What is surprising here is that there appears to have been no cross checking of their information. This is far from the first time that police or other agencies have acted on inaccurate information when it would have been relatively easy to check the integrity of the information they had (and I'm not just talking about the US here - slavish belief by all manner of government agencies in what the computer says seems to be fairly universal).
The "we did nothing wrong" attitude of the police is to my mind not acceptable, unless you live in one of those diminishing number of states where the law is what the government says it is. It would only have taken one trigger happy cop (and there are plenty of those about) for this to have become a tragedy and all because they failed to use their brains and actually make certain that their information was sound. This was after all not some anonymous tip off but a piece of information which could be checked elsewhere very easily (as SoCal said, the FAA database was 100% accurate). It is even more forgivable that the same thing had happened in the resent past with the same aircraft.