SWAT teams under scrutiny after PS3 shooting

via Fox

A criminology professor says SWAT team raids are usually reserved for high-risk situations to prevent suspects from arming themselves or destroying evidence.

David Klinger is an associate professor at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis. He was talking about the death of Peyton Strickland on December First in Wilmington.

Strickland was was shot as New Hanover County's Emergency Response Team, a SWAT equivalent, raided his house to arrest him in connection with an attack in which another teenager was struck with a blunt object and robbed of two PlayStation 3s.

Strickland was unarmed.

In the Strickland case, the team was requested by the University of North Carolina Wilmington police, who were investigating the PlayStation robbery.

They had seen an image of another of the suspects and two other men posing in pictures on the Internet with a shotgun, assault rifle and handguns. They considered that suspect likely to be armed.