The on-air shooting of a Virginia reporter and cameraman was “clearly” a hate crime, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said Thursday.

“I’m only going by the initial briefings I’ve had … I think quite clearly it was, and had a race component to it,” he told radio host John Gambling on “AM 970: The Answer.”

Early Wednesday, Vester Lee Flanagan II stalked and gunned down two former colleagues, Alison Parker, 24, and Adam Ward, 27, as Parker was conducting an interview on live television for CBS affiliate WDBJ.

Just a couple of hours after the shooting, he faxed a 23-page manifesto to ABC News, saying the execution of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., had pushed him over the edge, and he was ready to start a “race war.” He added that as a black gay man, he had suffered discrimination and sexual harassment.

“This is a very angry man, and it highlights in some respects the world we’re living — the social media world — that extra precautions that companies may want to take when they discharge somebody,” Bratton said.

“It might be a matter of watching these individuals through the public social media after they leave a company to ensure that they’re not making threats, or, in the case of this individual, quite clearly over the last couple of years he was just getting more and more wound up and then exploded.”

Flanagan recorded the shooting with his own camera and posted the chilling footage to his social media accounts several hours later, while authorities were still searching for him.

“The careful planning of this so that he gets himself filmed murdering these people, and then he’s filming it while he’s murdering them — this is the concern we have with the terrorists,” the top cop added.

“And now we’re bringing it into the more normal world, if you will. The 21st century is one of great challenge.”