It’s an incident that can be more or less summed up in one beautiful sentence: A Pokemon Go-playing driver slammed into a police car in Baltimore on Monday, with the entire incident captured on one of the officer’s body cameras.
Luckily, no one seems to have been injured in the incident. The officers were not in the police car when the Pokemon Go player’s Toyota RAV4 rammed the cruiser, while the driver and his passengers appear to have been protected by an extremely thick layer of stupidity.
The body camera video both depicts the moment of impact, when the Toyota slammed into the parked Dodge Charger police vehicle hard enough to briefly knock the two-ton car into the air and send it skipping several feet down the asphalt, and the awkward follow-up when the embarrassed young man driving the RAV4 climbed out, phone raised as if in explanation.
“That’s what I get for playing a dumb-ass game,” the Pokemon Go-playing driver said in a moment of lucidity he really could have used several seconds earlier. Police said the driver fully admitted to playing the app, which enables users to collect virtual monsters placed at real-world locations usually filled with actual people the users could be interacting with instead.
This is hardly the first Pokemon Go-related automobile accident to occur since the game exploded into popularity a little less than two weeks ago. Last week, a 28-year-old in upstate New York collided with a tree while playing the augmented-reality game, prompting the local police department to reiterate that, no, you should not be playing a video game on your phone while driving. Which by now should really, really be obvious.