Court upholds firing of 2 LAPD officers who ignored robbery call, played Pokémon Go

(The AEGIS Alliance) – An appellate court in California has concluded that a pair of LAPD officers were appropriately fired for playing the augmented-reality mobile game Pokémon Go rather than responding to an active robbery emergency.

Last Friday, a California court ruled the LAPD firing the two officers named Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell was justified for their 2017 misconduct, according to the Sacramento Bee on Monday.

On the day of April 15 in 2017, a video recording system in their police car caught the two cops talking about just how to capture a Snorlax and attempting to catch the rare Pokemon monster in the video game while neglecting a report of a number of individuals that were in the middle of robbing a Crenshaw area Macy’s, the judgment shows.

A police captain that went to the crime scene observed an additional police car positioned close by and questioned why the two cops didn’t respond to the active crime scene, court records pointed out.

The two cops asserted they didn’t hear the dispatch request for backup, however, on the police car recordings, they had been heard talking about if they should respond, and Lozano can be heard mentioning, “Ah, screw it.”

The cops are at that point heard for the following twenty minutes talking about the GPS-based Pokémon augmented-reality mobile video game and driving to a variety of places to “capture” digital critters, the court documents stated.

The two officers were fired after a police board of legal rights all concluded that both cops committed misconduct that had been “unprofessional and embarrassing” and breached the general public’s trust.

The two cops asked a court of law to reverse their firings, claiming to name a few things that the recordings of their private discussions were inaccurately utilized as evidence but the Superior Court judge rejected their request. The appeals court upheld this decision.

Jeffrey Childers – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.