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Hate crimes in big cities hit record high for second year in a row, new data shows

The man who opened fire in a Dollar Tree supermarket in Jacksonville, Florida, on Saturday targeted Black people because of their race, local police said. Using a rifle with a swastika drawn on it, he killed three people, deliberately targeting Black patrons, according to local authorities.

“He hated Blacks, and I think he hated just about everyone that wasn’t White,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters told CNN. “He made that very clear.”

The events that unfolded in Jacksonville were tragic, but hardly unique. In recent years, other racist shootings left people dead in Allen and El Paso, Texas; and in Buffalo, New York. Hate crimes also expand far beyond those headlines.

A leading group of experts, in a new study provided exclusively to USA TODAY, has found the number of hate crimes reported to police in 42 major U.S. cities rose 10% last year from the year before.