[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

Response time to an armed incident is fast, probably 20 minutes. Maybe less if police were injured. Cops oddly find themselves available to respond faster if one of their own is hit.

A lot depends on where the patrol vehicles are located.

Galveston PD might have anywhere from three to seven active patrol vehicles on the night shift unaccounted for. Unless Galveston PD have a lot more police presence than Reykjavík (where the PD is responsible for roughly four times the population and orders of magnitude more area) at night, there are only about three more cars on patrol right after midnight and there won't be all that many people at the station.

Galveston PD is just around 150 people, including detectives and support staff, which means that the patrol division is somewhere from 50-75 people. That makes it impractical to have patrol shifts that number much more than 10-15 people. So, Galveston PD doesn't have more than a few cars to respond with and unless midnight is a shift change for them, only one or two will be at the station, the rest will be, well, on patrol.

Galveston County Sheriff's Office is three times bigger, but more than half of their number are more like correctional officers, being responsible for the County Jail, prisoner transport, etc. There will be cars and officers at their station, much more numerous than at the local PD station next door, as they handle intake, processing, etc. Even so, absent a shift change, most of their patrol vehicles are spread around their patrol area, which is far larger than that of the Galveston PD. In fact, it can take a hour to get back from parts of it and none of the Sheriff's patrol cars will be patrolling near the shooting, as that's Galveston PD jurisdiction.

Total, unless shift change is at midnight, maybe three to six vehicles are actually at the two stations and ready to head out as soon as the officers run out, hopefully already wearing vests and with patrol carbines in their vehicles (actually optional, some have shotguns, some have only handguns). Random determination for how far away the rest of their patrol cars are, with no more than a couple having a chance of being inside Galveston proper.

Aside from that, it matters a lot how well coordinated the response from Texas DPS Highway Patrol, Gulf Coast Violent Offenders Task Force and any other departments or agencies that might lend support. To close off escape, the authorities need reinforcements from the other side of the Galveston Causeway.

Three cars with six cops in them, only half of whom have longarms, aren't going to successfully block two cars and a truck carrying a dozen men with longarms, especially not as all of the OpFor have combat experience (not all of them have professional military training, but all have fought several actions), two of them are competent former soldiers in their late thirties who have a lifetime of tactical and security experience, as well as proper training in defensive driving, close protection, etc., and one is a former Spetsnaz sniper with lots of urban warfare experience.

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

If this was a high-risk transport the police would have had back-up ready, the response time may be cut down by 5 minutes and could include SWAT.

It was a fairly routine arrest of a person of interest, someone who might as well have been a vixtim or witness rather than a perpetrator. At worst, she was suspected of having been an accomplice after the fact. She did not resist arrest and the officers who take her in are thinking that it looks like she's another kidnap victim, but she was cuffed and arrested as a material witness mostly as a matter of procedure, because there is always a chance that she was with the killer willingly and was complicit in the murders.

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

The police may not have clear enough Intel to cut the attackers in a barricade. They may make an error in assuming their route or just decide they're not certain enough of where they perpetrators are going to sacrifice units that could be searching for them.

There are two open roads where it's possible to drive from Galveston to the mainland. It's the I-45, which takes aroud six minutes from where the shooting is, and another, roundabout route, which would reach a point from where ,ultiple routes were possible again in about two hours.

In a world with radios, no one is going to make it out using the latter, because even the worst inter-agency cooperation possible would still have law enforcement waiting by the time the OpFor finished their scenic drive.

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

I don't know that the police would choose to block traffic to stop guys with assault rifles. They wouldn't want more police injured. They'd need to be sure they could minimize loss of life before they forced a confrontation. More likely they'd follow the vehicle with a helicopter until they can use a swat team in a controlled area.

This is why it's vital to know when there would be a helicopter in the air, who can ask for support from agencies that have one and how long it would take to reach the area in question.

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

If they stole the ambulance it's going to be easy to track. It's a big white truck with a number on top for IDing from the sky. They'll be able to track them with a helicopter or drone from so far away there's almost no chance the perpetrators will spot them.

The OpFor will not steal an ambulance. They have two rental SUVs, two rental Chevy Malibu sedans, two very ordinary-looking sedans and one box truck. Of these, the SUVs and box truck take part in the ambush and one surveillance sedan hopefully passes unnoticed while going the same way. Their goal is to get over the bridge before response is coordinated, reach a side street and a parking lot there where there are three new cars waiting. Depending on how wrll they do, they'll reach that place in somehwere between six minutes (only if everything succeeds perfectly) and fifteen minutes (most likely too late), with a plausible margin being 8-10 minutes.

Is that soon enough not to be seen by a helicopter as they change cars?

Will they manage to get over the bridge without cop cars on their tail?