Growing up Adams county myself, I'll go ahead and be the one to tell you that it was absolutely racially motivated. You do not want to be a minority out there. Hell, you don't want to be perceived as being left leaning at all out there. This is the same area where a ~15 year old girl was assaulted on camera, in front of a police officer for participating in a protest (IIRC, BLM, but I could be wrong). This made the front page of reddit when it happeend.
And this is very likely, corruption motivated as well. I have enough family and friends left out there who have first hand experience with the politics and policing of the area to know. In fact, I have a late friend who had this exact thing happen (though, one county over), on video and everything. He's just not a D list celebrity with money, so nobody cared.
If someone wrote a documentary about this area and tried to pass it off as fiction, people wouldn't believe it, as it would be considered too absurd to be believable.