Photo via DCPI. Image by Lia Kantrowitz
The New York Police Department on Wednesday announced that an unabashed white supremacist was behind the stabbing death of a black man in Midtown Manhattan earlier this week.Twenty-eight-year-old James Harris Jackson has confessed to driving from Baltimore, Maryland, on a mission to kill black people, police said. The suspect apparently admitted to fatally stabbing 66-year-old Timothy Caughman in the chest and back after an argument late Monday, and was about to attack an interracial couple before turning himself in just after midnight Wednesday."You need to arrest me," he reportedly told cops at the Times Square NYPD substation. "I have the knife in my pocket."According to the Daily News, Jackson, a US Army veteran, is part of a hate group in Maryland and the author of a racist manifesto, and had it out for black men linked romantically to white women. At a Wednesday press conference, the NYPD seemed to confirm at least part of that narrative, suggesting the crime was "clearly racially motivated" and that the Jackson was "specifically intending to single out" black men for assault."He picked New York because it's the media capital of the world and he wanted to make a statement," Chief of Detectives William Aubrey told reporters.Although the NYPD did not immediately provide more details on Jackson's ideology, the Southern Poverty Law Center says that 18 out of the country's 917 hate groups are located in Maryland. And while data is scant for 2017 so far, hate crimes were up by an average of 23 percent in nine major US metro areas last year.Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.
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