Farmington police investigate disturbing signs as possible hate crime

FARMINGTON, Utah — Police in Farmington say someone is spreading messages of hate in their city and it needs to stop. 

People have reported multiple signs on city property around Farmington Pond and the Lagoon trail. 

The theme behind them is ‘white lives matter’ but they took it a step further. 

Amanda Riddle’s morning walk down the trail was interrupted after she and her husband saw the message. 

“We noticed the second sign posted on the back of this, ‘white lives matter.’”, she read off the sign. “And ‘diversity is code for anti-white.’ That was really concerning.” 

She said they spotted two of them leaving behind some rather disturbing rhetoric, the other said ‘white nations are safe nations’ and  ‘we are not a melting pot.’ 

Riddle said, “A lot of effort and energy used to promote this and I’m sure there’s more out there that we didn’t come across.” 

Police found at least eight more. 

“Each of those signs that we find, we’re photographing and we document and we’re taking an incident report on. And we’re going to investigate as much as we can to identify who did this,” said Farmington Police Sgt. Brian Cooper.  

Cooper said it’s vandalism on city property, criminal mischief, and could be screened by prosecutors as a possible hate crime.  

“But there certainly is a racial motivation behind the posting of these signs. There’s no question about that,” he added. 

Cooper said this is not what the Farmington community is about. 

“To any minorities in our community, our police department supports you and will protect you,” he said. 

Riddle said it’s not enough to simply walk by and quietly disagree. 

“It’s not fair for people to feel unwelcome and unsafe in their community,” she explained. 

Cooper said there aren’t any known threats out of these signs but police would like to hear from anyone who sees more of them, or who has any information.