You are correct, race does not have anything to do with it. I worked p/t at The Home Depot for a few years. Same policy. Blacks, whites, Hispanics, they all steal crap. Most are drug abusers who sell the stolen property for drug money.
Late one evening, I was working in the garden center and chatting with the cashier just before locking up the gates. I looked up to see some white guy running at a steady pace from the direction of the front entrance. As he came closer I noticed he had 3 or 4 boxes of power tools. He ran right by me and to a car that was idling at the far end of the parking lot. I could have easily taken him down. But they weren’t paying me enough to risk some crack head pulling out a gun on me.
We had one white guy in his 50s we called Spiderman. For a year or more we could never catch him but he always left the packaging behind (with the theft sensor attached) in the upper reaches of the shelving. Another evening, a customer wanted a lawnmower and the only one of that model was in “overhead” (top of the shelving). I got the reach truck and pulled the box down. Sitting on the top of the box were a couple of empty DeWalt drill boxes.
I would be accidentally dropping very heavy items in close proximity to assholes like this. Maybe almost trip someone with a 2x4 or push an entire display of tools over on them by accident.