Indeed, sending a police patrol will only catch the kind of crime that happens in socio-economically disadvantaged communities, which in turn contributes to skewing the data to suggest that more crimes there, which leads to more policing, which leads to more crime, and so on.
Meanwhile, wage theft, over twice the size of all other kinds of theft put together, keeps growing year after year.
Police patrols should be entirely reactive, and not proactive. Proactive policing does not work.
I assure you mathematicians aren't optimizing the "visbile presence in the community". That's not something you need a mathematician for. Mathematicians are optimizing the ability of police to maximize the number of arrests by deciding which areas they should patrol in order to maximize crime.