There is a connection to the Starbucks incident where two black men were arrested while waiting for a friend; that's certainly why it's a headline in the NY Times. In both cases it 'feels' like the people in question were excluded / marked out for reasons which appear silly or superficial, and in both cases those people were non-white. The way that people model threats is complicated and hard to pick apart... One might be perceived as threatening for all kinds of reasons which change in weighting depending on context. You and your friend
may have received threat bonuses for features like tattoos, being male, being young, etc. Those features may have received different threat bonuses depending on setting, such as a darkened city alley vs a college campus, or a mall. Our threat models also get more aggressive as risk increases--smaller threats are taken more seriously when we think more is at stake. It's hard to comment on the factors at play in your experiences without all the details.
Perhaps these kids got a threat bonus for being non-white on a college campus. This is a valid question to pose, if you think that race could be over-weighted in our unconscious threat models--and the NY Times certainly draws our attention to race as an over-weighted factor in similar, recent incidents. But then again, perhaps these kids were scored as high risk because of the unfortunate parallels to previous Colorado school shooters who liked metal music.
I think your question may be more why it's in the news and here on HN: because some people care to reflect on their own threat models and consider how they might be biased--whether or not that is the case here. NYT's gotta eat, after all.