Baker lives just south of Georgetown Boulevard Park. Baker said she's happy with the basketball court, swing set, benches and other playground equipment scattered on the sloping site. Residents sometimes help maintain the park, but she also praised township workers who are quick to erase the occasional scribbling of graffiti.

The scene contrasts with one less than a mile away, where a basketball court and bare swing set are the lone amenities at Village Drive Park. The Barnegat Township Committee will vote Monday on whether to even things out by spending $71,074 in developer donations on playground equipment.

The investment will target three of five pocket parks scattered throughout Barnegat, according to township Administrator Dave Breeden.

The upgrades have been in the works since 2003, according to Staci Irwin, assistant director of the Barnegat recreation office.

"It's been several years since last update and a lot of the people in town have requested to have the parks made more usable," Irwin said.

In addition, a slew of new rules banning equipment with choke and poke points - such as jungle gyms - took effect Oct. 18, 2007, according to the state Department of Community Affairs Web site.

Noncompliant equipment will be removed; low or no-maintenance items that adhere to those codes will be installed at the small parks on Bilge Street, Beverly Drive and Village Drive by the start of summer, Breeden said Friday.

A spider jungle gym and a large, spring-powered rocking horse will be removed from the Beverly park. The Village park is empty and requires no modifications, Breeden said.

"The neighborhood parks are crucial, … especially for neighborhoods that are family oriented," Breeden said.

Builders of approved projects must pay $1,500 per house - or $750 per age-restricted home - to the township Recreation Trust Fund, which will provide the money to update the pocket parks, Breeden said.

Municipalities that fail to change their equipment face a $2,000 maximum fine, according to DCA spokesman Chris Donnelly. Citizen complaints prompt enforcement, which includes two hearings before the penalty is levied, Donnelly said in an e-mail.

DCA's playground safety guidelines are heavily based on advice from the U.S. Consumer Products and Safety Commission. They are available at

The police officers then threw a 200-pound dummy onto one of the officer's shoulders and sprinted - with the dummy in tow - back across the range to a makeshift finish line.

This popular SWAT team drill is called "Masked Entry."

Last year, the team set a world record in the drill when it finished in 1 minute, 6 seconds at the World SWAT Challenge in Little Rock, Ark.

It was the event that put the team over the top as it defeated 27 teams from around the world - including the German National SWAT Team (GSG-9), the two-time defending champion - to win the World SWAT Championship in its first trip to the competition.

This year the team is working even harder, because on April 9 it will attempt to defend its title.

This time, it will be the team everyone else is gunning for.

"Last year we prepared by watching tapes of the top teams competing in past events," said Stafford Township Sgt. Herman Pharo, the team commander. "Now those same teams are preparing by watching tapes of us."

For the last few weeks, the 11-man team has drilled for eight hours every day and then many of the officers hit the gym at least once a day.

"A lot of work goes into this. It can put a strain on your mind, your body and your home life. I haven't slept in two weeks, because I've been thinking about this," Pharo said. "We wouldn't go down there unless we thought we could win, and this is what we need to do to prepare to do that. We can't take shortcuts."

This year's team has three new members, but Pharo said it could be even better than the team that won four of seven events last year.

"As soon as we won last year, we knew that we wanted to try and repeat this year. So the guys have been working nonstop since last April," Pharo said.

The new team consists of seven officers from Stafford Township, two from Barnegat Township, and one each from Long Beach Township and Ship Bottom.

Barnegat Township Patrolman Chris Smith is a three-year veteran of the county's southern Emergency Services Unit, but this will be his first time in competition.

"Training for competition really makes us that much more proficient at what we do," Smith said. "Now it's not how many we can hit, it is how fast we can hit them."

In addition to not being able to fly under the radar anymore, Pharo said, there will also be several new events at this year's competition, and the event's organizers are not saying what they are.

"All we know is that they are going to focus more on physical fitness," Pharo said. "So what we are doing is practicing several variations of the drills that were there last year in order to be as prepared as we can be."

The World SWAT Challenge is more representative of what is required of real-life SWAT teams compared to other SWAT competitions, Pharo said.

"Other competitions, the teams get to use like 20 rounds to hit their targets, where in this competition we only get one round for each target and there is a severe penalty for each target missed," Pharo said.

Teams receive points based on how fast they complete each of a series of events. Faster times receive a lower score, but missed targets or other mistakes result in a team being hit with a time penalty.

Like last year, much of the cost to send the team to the event was funded by donations from local businesses. The trip is funded entirely by donations.

The largest donor this year was Tom Brown Jr., the owner of the Ocean Township-based Tom Brown, Jr.'s Tracker School, which is a tracking, nature and wilderness survival school.

According to Sgt. Steven Adams, of the Long Beach Township Police Department, Brown donated $10,000 and a trailer for the team to carry its equipment in.

"They money is what will help us get down there and it will also help use purchase some of the equipment that we'll need," Pharo said.

And this is donation that will make the community safer, Pharo said.

"Usually the only people who get to see what we can do are the bad guys. The competition helps the public understand how hard we're working to protect them," Pharo said. "And by competing we are able to gauge where we're at compared to other teams in the world. This helps us notice if there is something we need to work on, which in turn makes us more efficient in doing our jobs."

Not only did Pharo call the competitions beneficial, he said every SWAT team should enter them.

"Some departments worry about getting exposed as not being good," he said. "But how else are they going to know what they need to improve on?"

To e-mail Robert Spahr at The Press: