The MU Police Department determined that no crime was committed regarding fliers with racist language posted in Hatch Hall on Friday.

“Someone had put a flier in a public area in one of the residence halls,” MU spokesman Christian Basi said. “It was noticed rather quickly and brought to our attention. Residential Life staff members immediately removed it and contacted the police because there was a suspicion that there might have been some criminal intent.”

MUPD talked with the individual who made the fliers before determining there was no crime committed, Capt. Brian Weimer said.

“The information that was there has been forwarded to student disciplinarians to see if they have any rules or violations that they need to take action on, but there is no crime,” he said.

Weimer could not release the text of the flier or the name of the student in order to not interfere with student disciplinary action.

“This type of language is not conducive to a positive living and learning environment for students, faculty and staff,” Residential Life stated in a news release. “The University and the Department of Residential Life are committed to ensuring that all people are welcome members of our community and behaviors which interfere with that will not be tolerated.”

Weimer said there is no connection between this event and other racially-charged happenings in the past two years. A racial slur was found last year on a statue outside of Hatch Hall, and in February 2010 cotton balls were placed outside of the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center.

“Those were crimes,” Weimer said. “This was nothing to do with a crime.”

Following last year’s racially-charged graffiti message incident, the One Mizzou initiative was created to help bring further diversity awareness to MU. Basi said a big part of preventing incidents like this from happening in the future are education, information and communication.

“Each year we have more than 6,000 new faces on campus,” Basi said. “We have a variety of different events that happen each year where experts lead discussions about diversity issues on campus. Anytime we find anything like that, we take it extremely seriously. We don’t have tolerance for those types of displays. We will always be investigating those as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.”

— Hunter Woodall contributed to this report