I don't want to be charitable to the police, but this situation is a strange one.
If they were trying to bust a drug smuggling ring, it sounds like maybe there was parallel construction afoot. In other words, they may have been acting according to a supply of information beyond that which would ever be presented to the public, and could not be used to support a prosecution.
Reading between the lines, there's a hint that her role as an EMT put her in contact with pharmaceuticals that could be siphoned from channels of legal medical authority, as she was an insider. That, as an insider, she may have been a sacrifice by illegal operators, or that parallel construction would be the only way to parry criminals that could have access to insider tip offs that allow them to perpetually dodge getting caught.
This raises the spectre whereby, maybe there's more than one layer of misdirection, so where do you draw the line? How would you know whether the murder itself wasn't an internal turf war among rival corrupt operators using the aegis of authority?
If she was a medical operator, acting as a relay runner from an official position of trust, for a smuggling ring, we'll never know.
But the one other angle that bothers me is: maybe they were digital patsies. If the police used digital/mobile device sources of intel to determine that these were crooked operators, would they know or care if these were just regular people who had their devices targeted for squatting in caches and slack space, and remote relay/exit operations?
Would it be believable that a sophisticated matador practice could be employed as warning canary devices, so the real operators could throw a kill switch, if their canary croaks?
Hard to say...
The police would use a no-knock warrant if they were corrupt. Or if they thought they had the real target. But they could be made to believe a false target is authentic. I don't think we have dirty cops operating a no-knock death squad. Which means they probably believed they were taking down a legitimate suspect.
That only leaves open 2 possibilities by my count: She and her associates had compromised devices and were being used as canaries by real criminals, or they were the criminals.
The one probable vindicator is if knocking her link from the chain of smuggling relays should have an outwardly observable effect on some unknown portion of the black market. If a drought is induced, could it be that her death disrupted the distribution of drugs? Probably not a crime punishable by death, but this would point to a rational reason to have been seeking her arrest.
Meanwhile, there's probably enough noise introduced by pandemic lockdowns, and the notoriety of the press and media attention, that these other circumstances could play an outsized role in causing a drought in black market drug availability on their own.
Furthermore, in some cases, drug gangs are so powerful that one cannot discount the idea that any such gang that might operate canaries might also retain muckraking journalists with bribes, who might even work for payment in access to drugs. At that level of paranoia, you have to believe this may even be full spectrum warfare, involving very powerful transnational entities, and that this is akin to covert warfare.