Los Angeles Police Department officers played Pokémon Go instead of chasing suspects from a robbery at a mall just 200 yards away, newly-released dashcam footage shows.
“I got you a new Pokémon today, dude,” one of the officers can be heard telling the other in the video.
Officers Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell are also shown ignoring the radio summoning them to a Macy’s location at the nearby Crenshaw Mall.
“Ah screw it,” Lozano can be heard saying in response to the radio calls before driving around for another 20 minutes to various locations to collect Pokemons in the augmented reality game.
“I don’t want to be his help,” he even says in response to an LAPD captain’s backup request.
The damning footage shows the officers blowing through a stop sign, making an illegal U-turn, and speeding down a residential street in their relentless pursuit of the mythical creatures, with the pair laughing as they mused about in-game items like Pokéballs and potions.
When questioned later about why they didn’t respond to the robbery call, Lozano and Mitchell claimed they couldn’t hear the radio. But when their commanding officer reviewed the dashcam footage, he discovered they had deliberately ignored it so they could continue playing.
The pair then lied to investigators about playing the game during the April 2017 incident, according to court records.
The former officers were fired in 2018 after a unanimous vote by a disciplinary panel.
The ex-officers appealed their firings, which ultimately ended up before a California Court of Appeal, their lawyers arguing their conversations inadvertently captured on their cruiser’s dashcam were private.
However, the court didn’t accept the excuse with a judge calling their logic “flawed”.
Lozano was a 17-year veteran of the LAPD, while Mitchell had been on the job for seven years.