We don’t have room for face coverings with all of this other equipment.

Matthew Leslie

By the time you read this post I can only hope that the Fullerton Police Department Public Information Officer will have had the wisdom to remove a video Tweeted yesterday from the FPD’s PIO Twitter account depicting FPD’s Bicycle Team riding the trails and interacting with people without a mask in sight. The short clip begins with a (we hope) mock heroic pose on the flagstone steps in Hillcrest Park before cutting a montage of the uniformed cyclist officers riding three abreast on a trail, leaving scant room for any other riders, pedestrians, runners, or equestrians, but that isn’t the troubling part of the video.

During the middle of a pandemic when the city, county, and state are urging everyone to help stop the spread of the coronavirus by wearing a face covering and practicing social distancing of six feet from anyone not in our households, Fullerton’s bicycle mounted officers are shown riding city trails and interacting with people with no social distancing and without any sort of face coverings at all.

Here kid, everything we care about stopping the spread of COVID-19 fits on this card.

At one point, one of the maskless officers actually dismounts and approaches a baby in a stroller, handing the child something from less than two feet away! Are they unaware that nearly a thousand OC residents have died, so far, from COVID-19?? What in the world is the FPD thinking releasing this video? Already reluctant to enforce the statewide mask order, is Fullerton’s Police Department now actively signaling to people not to wear face coverings? Because that’s what it looks like.