Dephone the Police
Two LAPD officers fired for playing Pokemon Go instead of answering a call
On a busy Saturday night in South Los Angeles, LAPD Captain Darnell Davenport was speeding to a homicide scene when he heard a call on his police radio of a robbery in progress involving multiple suspects at the Macy’s in the Crenshaw Mall.
Capt. Davenport just happened to be in the vicinity of Crenshaw and King Blvds., where the Macy's was located, and saw a police vehicle in an alley not responding to the call.
He would learn later it was because the two officers were playing Pokemon Go.
“I don’t want to be his help,” Officer Louis Lozano said to his partner Officer Eric Mitchell, when they heard Davenport had decided to take the burglary call when he noticed how close he was to it.
The pair were searching for a powerful Snorlax their Pokemon tracker was telling them would be available for 4 minutes.
But as they were heading to find the obese cartoon character, Mitchell gleefully alerted Davenport a Togetic was south of their location on Crenshaw on 50th street.
Pokemon Go, is an altered reality game where, using a mobile phone, one can find and battle virtual characters as you roam around real life locations. The creators of the game plead participants not to play while driving, and purists scoff at using trackers.
Apparently the LAPD consider playing the game while on duty and lying about it a fireable offense. Although the pair appealed the case, audio and video shot inside their vehicle of the officers talking about the game at the same time Captain Davenport spotted them intentionally ignoring the call, did not help their case.
The original incident occurred on April of 2017, and if it had not been for the officers attempting to appeal the termination, and losing that appeal on Friday, their foolishness would have drifted away like a Snorlax dream.
But alas, the court documents of the hilarious appeal were revealed today and now Snorlax is trending on U.S. Twitter.
For a department who is doing its best to justify it’s $8 million-a-day budget, this is just another in a series of black eyes it has given itself, the most recent being the accidental shooting death of a 14-year-old girl in a North Hollywood dressing room via a trigger-happy officer last month.
“Playing Pokémon Go showed complete disregard for the community, wasted resources, violated public trust and was unprofessional and embarrassing to the Department,” the city argued when it fired the duo.
