US Law Enforcement Response, Time, Scale and Coordination (Galveston, TX)

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

As for the sorta "fast-and-loose" stuff done so far, the PCs involved in law enforcement should get a moderate reaming, which will include a "no we're really not kidding" warning that the reaming for any future deviations will involve a deep-core drilling Derrick, and result in an unhappy future as a paper-pushing desk-jockey with no hope of career advancement. Ever.

Well, Lucien Lacoste and Teddy Smith are volunteer Reserve Deputies. Sheriff Trochesset can't dock their pay and can't threaten to reassign them, really, because they're not paid and if reassigned, can just stop donating their time. That being said, while their boss will allow them to get away with astonishing things, as long as he's convinced that they are bending the law to deal with occult things that normal police can't handle, the senior people from alphabet agencies, state and federal, will not be so understanding.

Legally, the PCs are actually technically in the clear. They had a warrant from the local judge, authority from their boss, the county sheriff, and the Sheriff has pretty unambigous jurisdictional authority in his county. What's going to infuriate the feds is that the PCs clearly deliberately kept them out of things and used obfusticating paperwork (critical success on Administration) and expert knowledge of exactly how far they could stretch institutional rivalries (success by 10 on Savoir-Faire (Police)) to ensure that by the time the feds got there, everything was over.

Aside from making the feds look like idiots and demonstrating cavalier disregard for interagency relations, the PCs were technically legally empowered to enforce the warrant. However, their excuses for not waiting until they had SWAT, USCG and other alphabet agendy support a mere 10-15 minutes later will sound very thin, albeit precisely the sort of thin excuses that would hold up in court, even as the feds know very well that the PCs are lying. Basically, the PCs risked their lives without needing to do so, but can justify it well enough to escape any formal punishment. The feds can try to blame the deaths on the GCSO Reserve Deputies not waiting for backup, but the PCs will counter that their paper-thin excuse that they believed they heard a cry for help actually checks out, as several victims appear to have been killed before the PCs boarded, and they rescued others that were being attacked.*

To ASAC Michel of the FBI and any other senior figures involved, however, the PCs appear to be crazy reckless and/or actively hostile to federal agencies. Or lying through their teeth because they had important inside information gathered through illegal means and needed to come up with an alternative way to justify boarding the Aqueronte. So a savvy fed might conclude that the PCs have an informant** but don't want to enter him into the official case files or that they had an illegal wiretap.

A savvy and occult-aware fed might conclude that the PCs knew about a supernatural threat and were avoiding exposing mundane cops to a vortex of dark spirits that had a high chance of causing blue-on-blue incidents.

*A somewhat awkward issue may be the mistreated victim who was executed with a shot to the back of the head. True, not with any weapon carried by the PCs, but not with a weapon found aboard either. And her status as victim or perpetrator is complex, given that her face is smeared with the blood of another victim and pieces of intenstines will be found in her mouth and gullet.
**Other than Mr. Sandoval, who refused to talk to federal investigators, but strangely was very cooperative with the PCs. Mr. Sandoval is now claiming to be an innocent bystander who had no idea what the men in whose company he briefly found himself were planning to do, but is willing to give all the information that might be desired about his place of employment, in case anyone there was responsible for this heinous attack. It may be significant that the PCs, whose testimony would be crucial to convict Mr. Sandoval of any serious crimes, are now saying that it's possible that he was involuntarily in the company of the shooters and picked up a weapon during the shooting to defend himself and/or help the police in an active shooter situation. Yes, the PCs absolutely made a deal with the leader of the OpFor that they'd do their best to let him escape the consequences of his actions if he'd help them catch his bosses.