Pacific Index

The Forest Grove police have concluded their investigation into the racist posts made on Yik Yak

The investigation into the racist Yik Yak posts targeting black students at Pacific University has been closed as of Thursday, Oct. 24th. The case will not move forward to prosecution.

The Forest Grove Police Department was responsible for investigating the allegations, and the head detective on the case spoke on the language used in the posts. “That speech is, for lack of a better word, terrible, and it probably violates some code of conduct at Pacific,” he shared “But it doesn’t break any laws.”

“Just for speech alone, you would have to have criminal mischief,” he expanded,
sharing some examples of what would constitute as a crime. “Somebody’s car gets damaged, somebody’s tires get popped, somebody gets physically confronted and maybe there’s a threat of bodily harm at a level of deadly force or serious injury.”

According to the detective, the police department was only notified of the Yik Yak posts, not any of the following racist allegations (such as the student who found a cotton branch left on their car). Due to this, the investigation was strictly narrowed down to speech- which is tightly protected by the First Amendment. “You have to have the underlying crime, plus the bias,” the detective explained. “There’re a lot of bad acts that are not crimes.” In order for the Yik Yak posts to reach persecution, there would have needed to be sufficient evidence of threats to either person or property to constitute a crime.

Furthermore, the case did not yield any names of the users on Yik Yak who were
engaging in the racist commentary. The IP addresses were traced to reveal the general location of the users, but the broad results showed Pacific University and the surrounding area only. Typically, law enforcement would write a search warrant for the IP addresses to reveal more specific information regarding the users but were unable to for this investigation. “We can’t do that without probable cause of a crime,” the detective clarified.

More information on this situation will follow.