No Parkémon!
Ticketed for ‘innocent’ gaming in green space
HE GOT Poké-stopped!
Cops slapped a 37-year-old stockbroker with a summons for playing the addictive phone game in a Brooklyn park after hours.
Albert Wang was at Washington Park and Myrtle Ave. in Fort Greene Park last Wednesday at 1:50 a.m. on his way to a virtual “gym” where the digital creatures fight imaginary battles when four cops stopped him for being there after 1 a.m.
“It was an innocent mistake,” Wang said Monday. “I live across the street and it was a hot night. The rule was written on the sign in fine print. It was easy to miss it.”
He said he swore to the police he didn’t know the rule and wouldn’t break it again — but they slapped him with a summons anyway.
On the summons, cops wrote as the reason for the summons: “Just playing Pokémon on his cell phone.”
The Pokémon gym happened to be located at the 108-year-old Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument — which memorializes the 11,500 Americans who died in captivity on 16 British prison ships during the Revolutionary War, and contains a tiny portion of those soldiers’ remains.
Wang said the “gym” there is attracting Pokémon Go players into the park at late as 3 a.m.
Wang, noting he is an “active Pokémon player,” said the cops detained him and two other people for about 30 minutes and gave him a criminal court summons, which requires him to appear in court.
The app lover pointed out that people who are ticketed for having an open container of alcohol or for urinating in public can mail their fines in, but he has to go to court.
“The amount of implied social costs of this incident — the number of hours for all personnel involved in the court appearance — versus the actual offense seems so absurd that it borderlines on comical, let alone the draconian use of police authority,” he said.
An NYPD spokesman said Wang did not receive the summons for playing Pokémon Go, but for being in the park after curfew.
He said cops have discretion to decide whether to summons someone in the park after hours.
Wang has to appear in court Oct. 6.