Snorlaxing on the job
Saturday, April 15, 2017 was a busy day in the Southwest Division of Los Angeles. Police officers Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell were assigned to a “foot beat patrol.” And as one might expect, a “foot beat” in Los Angeles actually involves officers in a car.
Lozano and Mitchell were supposed to provide community services and address “quality of life” issues in the Crenshaw Corridor and Leimert Park area. This is a heavily built-up region south of Interstate 10 and about halfway between the Fashion District and Marina del Rey.
It is also not far from the Crenshaw Shopping Mall, and Lozano’s and Mitchell’s supervising captain happened to be passing through the area en route to a reported homicide scene when he heard a report of a “211 in progress” at the Macy’s at the Crenshaw Mall; a “211” is a robbery. The captain could see the store from his position, and also happened to see another police unit backed into an alley nearby. The unit didn’t move in response to the robbery call, and he assumed that it might have been assigned to duty that didn’t permit it to respond to such a call, such as a traffic detail.
The captain himself decided to respond, and radioed that he was on his way. There followed five to seven chaotic minutes while other units responded to the reported robbery. Lozano and Mitchell’s immediate supervisor, a Sergeant Gomez, was listening to the report, and tried to contact them, but received no response. That evening, Gomez met with them and asked for further details about where they had been during the robbery. They explained that they had been at nearby Leimert Park, that it had been very noisy, and they hadn’t heard the robbery call. Gomez emphasized that monitoring radio traffic was important, and told them to avoid such noisy areas while on duty.
The next day, however, Gomez remembered that there was a “digital in-car video system (DICVS),” which is sort of a “body camera” for police cars. Gomez decided to check the recording, and what he heard no doubt made him want to swallow his insignia. According to the recording, it had been Lozano’s and Mitchell’s patrol unit that the captain had seen in the alley right around the corner from the mall; they in fact did hear the robbery radio call; they discussed whether they should assist, with one of them joking that he didn’t want to be the one to back up the captain; and they decided to respond to a different location and left the area.
All of that would have been bad enough — after all, they lied about hearing the call, their whereabouts when it came in, and what they did to respond. But what happened next made the rest of this pale in comparison. Because the recording also disclosed that a number of times that day, Lozano and Mitchell had been playing the “Pokémon Go” video game while on duty in their patrol unit. (According to a helpful footnote in the court decision that eventually sorted all this out, “Pokémon Go is an ‘augmented reality’ mobile phone game that ‘uses the mobile device GPS to locate, capture, battle, and train virtual creatures, called Pokémon, which appear as if they are in the player’s real-world location.’”)
At one point, Mitchell alerted Lozano that “Snorlax” had “just popped up” at “46th and Leimert.” For about 20 minutes, the officers then drove around their patrol area trying to get to various locations where their phone would allow them “locate, capture, and battle” these virtual creatures — including “Snorlax.” (Another helpful footnote explains that “‘Snorlax’ is a Pokémon creature known as ‘the Sleeping Pokémon.’”)
When questioned further about what the video recordings had revealed, Lozano and Mitchell denied cruising the length and breadth of their patrol district in pursuit of imaginary (or virtual-reality) computer creatures. They said that they simply had been discussing the game while they attended to legitimate calls. But because the recordings told a different story, and after considering their admissions to some of the allegations and denials of others, the police review board eventually found against the officers on five of six charges, and recommended that both be dismissed. The Chief of Police upheld that decision.
Lozano and Mitchell first took their dismissals to the superior court, which upheld their firing. Undaunted, they went on to the court of appeal. It not only upheld their dismissal (and provided lots of important information about Pokémon Go) but ordered the decision “published,” so that it will become precedent in future cases.
Just in case there might be other would-be Pokémon warriors on the force.