A California appellate court has ruled on Friday that two Los Angeles cops who decided to play Pokémon Go instead of responding to a robbery were adequately fired.
The court ruled that the Los Angeles Police Department was justified in firing the two officers, Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell, for misconduct in 2017, according to the Sacramento Bee’s report on Monday.
On April 15, 2017, a video system in the officers’ patrol car captured them joking about how to capture a Snorlax and the rare Togetic in the video game while ignoring a report of some armed robbers who were in the process of robbing a Macy’s in the Crenshaw area, the ruling said.
Another responding who arrived at the scene saw the two officers’ patrol car parked nearby and wondered why they hadn’t responded and answered it themselves, according to court documents.
Lozano and Mitchell claimed they hadn’t heard the radio request for backup. However, on the patrol car recordings, Mitchell was heard asking Lozano whether to respond, and Lozano could be heard saying, “Ah, screw it,” the court filings said.
For the next twenty minutes, Lozano and Mitchell were then heard discussing the GPS-based Pokémon augmented-reality cellphone game and driving to various locations to “capture” virtual creatures, according to the filings, per Fox News.
Lozano and Mitchell were subsequently fired after a police board of rights unanimously ruled that they violated the public’s trust by committing misconduct that was “unprofessional and embarrassing.”
The fired officers recently asked a court to overturn their firings. Lozano and Mitchell argued, among other things, that the recordings of their private discussions were misused as evidence. However, their petition was denied by the Superior Court judge. The appeals court upheld that decision.
