[MRM]

The initial police response with the high risk tac team, snipers, and copters came about because of a very understandable mixup over the location of the burglary. The police got a little excited taking the call and mistook "Alamo, California" for "Los Alamos, New Mexico". Naturally they threw all their resources at it.

The higher ups were alerted and got involved, quickly escelating the response to prove their importance. They were shrewd enough to suspect there might be a problem with the report of this possible international incident, so they didn't alert the national media right away. However, they didn't want to run the risk to their careers of being called soft on terrorism, or being open to charges that they brought less than their entire resources to bear on a credible threat on the nations's top nuclear facility, so they brought in the copter as the icing on the cake.

After the sleeper cell was captured, New Mexico was located on a state higway map, the evidence siezed, and a fifth of it consumed, reality returned. The local news declined to report on the gang that couldn't drive straight and the story angle "Cops in copters outnumber crashing criminals twenty to one" didn't seem like a winner, so they went of looking for an orphaned panda to photograph.