It is racism, and it's been amplified by news media which selectively report on crimes ("if it bleeds, it leads") and fear-based social media like Nextdoor and local Facebook groups which give a megaphone to every overly suspicious neighbor and self-appointed "neighborhood watch" member.
What's changed isn't the amount of crime. It's the amount of it you get told about.
Real people are having real crimes committed against them. Wanting a society where that doesn't happen is as far from racist as you can get. The people who stole $9k of my former startup's equipment were just as likely white, anyway.
Its a pattern depressingly similar to Artificial Intelligence (after all, Elon Musk has made the compelling argument that companies are just AIs of a different form). If you train an AI to predict future possibility of committing a crime based on someone's face, using data of past crimes/arrests/etc, the output will likely, unfortunately, disproportionately rate Black individuals as likely to commit. When deployed improperly, this would lead to increased surveillance and enforcement, more crimes are noticed, more confrontations, accidents happen, and the prediction is suddenly true.
The past does not predict the future; it writes it, and humanity is the pen. The outcomes these predictions promise aren't intrinsically true; they become true because they become recursive inputs into some networked intelligence system, whether that be a computerized artificial intelligence, a company, a government, a market economy, or even humanity as a whole, which then, in adversarial situations, optimizes for self-preservation.
Boredom, I'd venture.
> some reason driven by something other than actual facts on the ground
Maybe Citizen and NextDoor's adoption is made up. I don't think it is. People are responding to something. It's not racism.
It's stuff like the state of Venice Beach in Los Angeles, people getting stabbed to death by homeless people, in their own homes. It's the absolutely insane number of bike thefts in Cambridge. It's the constant scam phone calls to your parents and grandparents. What do you want me to say, that the experience and trauma of getting shit stolen from you can't be reduced to a number? It's a fucking arson. The property crime is ultimately going to be connected to violence.
We are spoiled today by an environment where, if your LTV exceeds the cost of Amazon just replacing your stolen package, sure, it doesn't matter. It is truly a profound awakening for rich people, when they realize that whether or not the credit card company gives you money in a dispute has nothing to do with the merits of what you're saying and everything to do with whether you'll be LTV positive after they pay you back. We are relying on being rich to solve problems rather than solving the crime.
Property crime is a regressive tax on society! Amazon can't afford to replace poor people's packages, because a poor person will never make the money back. Credit cards can't service poor people fairly in disputes. Don't you see that property crime reduction serves poor communities much more than rich ones? They are the ones who can't park their cars in garages, who can't replace the $20 in a stolen wallet. They have more to lose!