"Still to be held accountable are those who put a SWAT team at the door of an 18-year-old college student who was unarmed," Strickland's father, Raleigh lawyer Don Strickland, said in a prepared statement early last week.

Those words call into question both the decision to deploy 10 members of the New Hanover County sheriff's SWAT-style Emergency Response Team and the aggressive tactics the elite tactical squad used Dec. 1 to storm the house during a night raid.

In this case, heavily armed deputies were executing a search and arrest warrant on Strickland and two other students suspected of assaulting another student with a deadly weapon and robbing him of two PlayStation video game consoles. The deputies were knocking down the front door when the shots that killed Strickland were fired by a member of the team who mistook the sound of the battering ram striking the door for hostile gunfire.

Authorities have cited the violent nature of the alleged crime, an earlier assault case against Strickland and the discovery of a picture posted on the Web of one of the suspects posing with a gun as reasons why UNC-Wilmington police called in the sheriff's tactical squad.

But two academics who have co-authored major nationwide studies of SWAT team missions and training question why the squad chose to knock down the front door of the rental home using a "dynamic entry" tactic. Such a tactic is commonly employed during life-threatening hostage situations or drug raids, when officers want to seize narcotics that can be easily dumped down a toilet or drain.

"They can't flush a PlayStation," said David Klinger, associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "Why not just surround the place and give 'em a shout? They come out, you cuff them and you go in and find the evidence."

Some SWAT teams use less-aggressive tactics for lesser crimes and less-dangerous situations because they're concerned about potential wrongful death lawsuits from botched "dynamic entry" raids and the safety of officers and citizens. These include "surround and call-out," when the team cordons the house and calls the suspect to come out. This has the advantage of placing officers in safe, defensive positions and allowing suspects to clearly identify police instead of mistaking them for home invaders or rival gang members or drug dealers, Klinger said.

The Strickland case illustrates the increased use of SWAT teams to conduct drug raids and serve arrest and search warrants for both high-risk felony cases and lesser crimes -- if officers think a threat of violence exists. It also underscores the lack of uniform training requirements for officers serving on these elite tactical squads.

"There's absolutely no standards or national accreditation or anything a department has to do to establish a tactical team," said Peter Kraska, a criminal justice professor at Eastern Kentucky University and co-author of two nationwide studies of SWAT team deployments and training. "So many people have the misconception that because there's a SWAT team, its members are competent and highly trained ... and it's just not the case."

North Carolina -- and most other states -- don't set statewide standards for tactical training, either for classroom work or practicing realistic scenarios, Kraska said. As a result, training requirements and other standards are set by individual agencies. The amount of time tactical teams practice each month varies widely -- from zero for some small-town teams to more than 40 hours for some big-city units, according to Kraska's work.

A departmental order requires New Hanover County's 26-member Emergency Response Team to train 12 hours a month -- roughly 144 hours a year -- but leaves it up to the team commander to set the schedule and mentions no mandatory courses.

The New Hanover County team has a core of six full-time members, while 20 part-timers are drawn from deputies with other duties to perform when the team isn't activated. Teams of part-time members are common at small- to medium-size departments where manpower and budget demands are tight.

Citing the advice of lawyers retained to handle a possible civil lawsuit against his department, New Hanover County Sheriff Sid Causey declined to answer questions whether the tactical squad trains for more hours than the order requires. Causey did say Cpl. Chris Long, a 10-year deputy and team member dismissed after firing the three shots that killed Strickland, "exceeded" the team's training, firearms and fitness requirements.

Training is critical for tactical teams, said Klinger, co-author of another nationwide SWAT study that shows teams averaged less than one incident a year where officers fired their weapons at suspects or had accidental firearms discharges.

"You've got to have really squared-away, well-trained guys making these decisions," he said. "Otherwise you can have a disaster."

(Staff writer Matthew Eisley and news researchers Brooke Cain and Denise Jones contributed to this report.)

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