Today’s news of the arrest of a “person of interest” in Altoona, Pa., suspected to be the murderer of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare executive gunned down in cold blood on a Manhattan street last week, should remind us all that police work is pretty often unglamorous and workmanlike. That doesn’t, however, mean this wasn’t a job well done.

This was no dramatic SWAT team raid. The brilliance of a singular detective’s deductive reasoning was unneeded.

Luigi Mangione was just “sitting there eating,” Joseph Kenny, the NYPD’s chief of detectives, told a press briefing. A McDonald’s employee recognized Mangione and alerted local authorities. It’s very likely that the police’s steady release of photos over the days that followed the murder contributed to the employee’s identification of the man sitting alone and eating his fast-food meal. Those photos were gleaned through the review of “thousands of hours” of surveillance footage for clues and evidence.

According to the New York Times, video footage “led the police to the physical evidence at the core of their investigation, including the backpack that officers found in Central Park Friday evening.”

And it was the absence of surveillance video of the man thought to be the assassin that on Friday finally yielded the news that he had most likely fled the city for parts unknown shortly after the shooting.

Hundreds of times over the course of 11 days, the man believed to be the killer, whose name remains a mystery to the authorities, appears before one of the 60,000 cameras to which police investigators have access, a senior law enforcement official said on Friday.

Those photos were distributed to the press (and thus, to the public). And it’s likely that every American police officer in every town and city on the East Coast saw them morning and evening in his pre-patrol brief.

Of course, the capture of the apparent assassin also included something else that’s often required to apprehend criminals: the cooperation and assistance of everyday people aware enough to see something and then, critically, to say something.

How often, after a mass shooting or terrorist attack, do we hear neighbors tell reporters that they never saw anything out of the ordinary at the home of the killer?

That didn’t happen this time — and for that we can thank the hard work of the NYPD, the local police in Altoona, and a normal American with some situational awareness.