I've lived here my whole life so I don’t have anything to compare it to, but the store clerks around where I live, and anywhere I've been in the US, couldn’t be sweeter if they tried, in spite of having been abused by miscellaneous a-holes during the pandemic. Maybe what you're experiencing is a California thing. I haven't been there since the pandemic. My son worked in a Walgreens during the pandemic, and the assholey customers really got to him, even though they were a small minority. That was in the state of Washington, so it's west coast at least.
No bus driver or railway conductor has ever given me any shit, in fact one recently was very helpful to me when I got on the wrong train.
Cops I stay away from, to the greatest extent possible. They don't give me any shit either but then again I'm white. Don't ask my son about cops. He was a manager in that Walgreens and soon gave up calling the cops about shoplifting. They'd be like, "What do you want me to do about it?" Well, can we start with, YOUR JOB?
He had to slip say 10 bucks a pop to a local thug to go and kick the shit out of this or that shoplifter. Not much trouble after that.