I'm probably going to get roasted for saying this, but this is completely unsurprising to me. When I was in college, folks from India and other low trust societies would mercilessly cheat on their projects and exams, blatantly helping one another on individual works, and the college knew about it and didn't care. When I had brought this up at one point, I was told by a professor that it was a cultural difference that…
Yes because Americans never cheat to get ahead and we are all morally superior…
That's usually why the first port of call when some corruption is detected is Finding What's Weird and the second is Not Like The Rest Of Us.
San Francisco's city government is hopelessly corrupt and visibly so for someone who has lived under other obviously corrupt governments. But that is not even apparent to faraway Republicans who are the only ones who will say it is.
But those people are similarly ignorant of the massive corruption of their own local government.
It has taught me a new path of success for corruption: that of hiding in plain sight among those of your identity.