Santa Rosa police say they debunked declare unfold on TikTok that officer urged individuals to take away masks

Santa Rosa police said they had debunked a widespread claim that one of their officers asked customers at a mall to remove their face masks.

“We are sure that no officer from the Santa Rosa police has made the alleged comments,” said the police when the results of their investigation were announced on Thursday.

The investigation was triggered by a high-profile video posted on TikTok in which a woman in the Santa Rosa Marketplace on Monday claimed to have heard an officer over a loudspeaker “to tell people to take off their masks because they behave like slaves ”.

In a detailed statement, the police described the results of their investigation into the incident, during which surveillance cameras checked footage and witnesses were interviewed. A uniformed officer visited the mall to buy lunch but left a few minutes before the woman said she heard the face mask announcement, police said.

Police said no other witnesses claimed to have heard comments on the video, but two people reported similar comments that “came from a white vehicle … previously seen in Santa Rosa”.

“The person in the vehicle used an amplified device to call messages,” said the police statement.

“The SRPD does not believe that the woman has lied … but their assumption that it is an SRPD officer was not correct,” according to the police evaluation of the incident.

The woman’s account was reported to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. After the police released the results of their investigation, the newspaper reported that the investigation found the woman’s allegations to be “unfounded.”

The woman who posted the video has since withdrawn her allegation and the video has been deleted by TikTok because she had received death threats from other users of the online platform, as she told the press democrat.

Steve Rubenstein is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @SteveRubeSF