"Given that this guy was 18, with several serious charges pending against him"
Just making up facts as you go along?? I read the article, it said he had a case pending for assault. One becomes several?? Misdemeanor assault becomes serious charges?? Sounds like a pushing match at a college frat party. Or quit hitting on my girlfriend. Look up the NC statutes for assault and see what falls into that category, you'd be surprised.
"It's VERY unlikely that they'd send out a "elite emergency response team" with no-knock entry authorization"
Never discount the perceived need to "train".
Kid was a punk, yes, Al Capone, no.
What if it was someone else coming to the door with a video game controller. Say his girlfriend or a younger brother? Would all of those who seem to take pleasure in jack booted thug law enforcement tactics be so gleeful?
The charges pending against him include the ones that this arrest attempt were for. The fact that he hadn't yet appeared in court for these particular charges doesn't mean they shouldn't be taken into consideration when deciding how to approach taking him into custody. Note that the university police were not interested in trying to handle him on their own. The fact is, we know a lot less about his background than the people who made the decision to approach him this way knew. At this point, I see no reason to assume that it was inappropriate. Perhaps the investigation will bring to light facts that show otherwise, but I don't believe in jumping to conclusions that law enforcement is always in the wrong when somebody they're dealing with gets hurt.
A few years after I graduated from a small liberal arts college, the Vice President at the time was coming to speak there. The Secret Service has access to information about juvenile records, and put it to good use. They ended up doing a no-knock entry of a female student's dorm room. I'm sure at first there was wailing on campus about how this was unjustified abuse of power, yadda, yadda. But it turned out this student had a juvenile record that included arson and planting a bomb in the home of an official of her school. So the Secret Service agents did a little poking around, and had a chat with the girl's chemistry professor and lab TAs (who of course had no knowledge of her criminal background). Having learned from them that she had displayed unusual interest in certain types of explosives, they asked to have the chem labs' inventory of relevant chemicals checked. Uh oh, significant quantities of ingredients for the very things she'd been so interested in were inexplicably missing. When they did the no-knock entry, nobody who witnessed it or heard about it shortly afterwards understood why it was deemed necessary, but it was. And yes, she did have the chemicals in her dorm room, but she reportedly told the Secret Service agents she wasn't planning to blow up the VP, just the Dean's office!