Police in Baltimore are adding to the chorus of law enforcement everywhere, urging folks to put down Pokémon Go while they’re driving after a man distracted by the game sideswiped an empty police cruiser.
An officer’s body camera captured the moment the SUV collided with the Baltimore police car around 3:30 a.m. on Monday morning.
Police officers who had just finished a call caught up with the driver, who had pulled to a stop down the street. In a video posted by BPD on Twitter, the driver gets out of the car and shows his phone’s screen ostensibly with the game on it. He can be heard on camera saying, “That’s what I get for playing this dumb ass game.”
According to police, he later fully admitted to looking down while playing Pokémon Go behind the wheel. There were other people in the vehicle as well, but no one was hurt. That might not have been the case, police warn.
“This could have easily been somebody crossing the street and struck by the vehicle. There could have been somebody inside that vehicle, but fortunately, there wasn’t,” a media representative for Baltimore police told WBAL (warning: link has autoplay video).
It’s a game, he adds, but not when you’re behind the wheel of a 2,000-pound piece of metal driving down a roadway.
He’s not the first distracted driver we’ve heard of who blamed their Pokémon Go addiction for bad behavior behind the wheel: a New York motorist was lucky that only his car was demolished last week when he slammed into a tree while playing the mobile game.
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
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