It seems disingenuous to say that facial recognition failed. As far as I can tell, all the images we had of these suspects were either very low-resolution, taken from angles, or both. Seems plausible that law enforcement didn't have any good candidate images from which to run a facial recognition search.

> In the end it was mostly dumb luck

What? Painstaking police work went in to getting images of these suspects, and the release of those photos are almost certainly what led to Thursday's events and, ultimately, the killing and capture of the suspects.

> the city lockdown failed (the guy smoking the cigarette outside when he saw the blood was technically violating the lockdown)

Firstly, the lockdown is what forced suspect #2 to hide out in a boat instead of fleeing the area. Secondly, and less importantly, the guy smoking a cigarette wasn't violating the lockdown. It had ended prior to him going outside.

Was there luck involved? Of course. But there was also tremendous work done by a number of law enforcement agencies - without which, the suspects may never have been killed and captured.