Don't tase men, bro!
Increasingly Americans are against police use of force under any circumstance.
Under the hood of American public opinion, changes that preceded the BLM protests have been ongoing. Since 1973, GSS surveyees have been asked under what scenarios it is appropriate for police to use force against an adult male.
All across the period, there is a growing disapproval of using the force. As of 2021, 21% of Americans say it is unacceptable for police to use force against a person who is attacking them! 40% disagree with using force against an escaped suspect, even more than they disagree with ever using force (maybe their objection is ontological; if a suspect has truly escaped police, it is logically impossible to hit him).
Is this a general objection to using violence?
Is this the better angels of our nature, making us all Eloi unwilling to use violence under any circumstance? Several questions in the GSS asking when it is acceptable for a civilian to hit an adult male allow us to examine this.
Three scenarios involve various crimes, making them a better comparison to a situation a policeman would be involved in. One scenario is Ever.
The only clear trend is in the opposite direction, there is growing approval for hitting a person for striking a child (mind you, not his child). Ironically, this growth in approval of violence is probably due to the growing unacceptability of hitting children. Disapproval for Ever was 33% in 1973 and 35% in 1994.
The problem seems not to be people using violence to stop crime, but police doing so.
Elite diffusion?
An argument has been made that the adoption of negative opinions with regard to policing is advanced by "the Elite". Safe in their neighborhoods and distant from crime they can allow themselves to adopt "luxury beliefs" that are disconnected from the reality of law enforcement.
At least on the narrow issue of police use of force, this is very much not the case.
Self identified Lower class and those with less than a high school degree show the most objection; this is not changed by looking only at white people and should not be affected by the fact that those categories contain more criminals as per the previous post, criminals do not differ much from the public in their opinion on police force.
The Political divide and conquer
The political divide on the issue is obvious; the left possesses greater sympathy for criminals and is therefore more disapproving of using force against them, yet the dynamic of the change is interesting. Liberals/Democrats moved on the issue, taking the public with them, while Conservatives/Republicans were left behind.
This same dynamic of the leftward movement with the public can be seen in the proportion of people who agree with the statement "courts are too harsh".
This also provides more support for the proposition that the left is less harsh on crime.
More generally, the aforementioned dynamic of leftward movement with the public, particularly on social questions, has been noticed before and can be seen in a variety of cases.
Why move?
This movement is occurring due to younger generations becoming increasingly liberal. On a 1–7 ranking from liberal to conservative, we can see that Americans have shifted almost 0.7 points in the direction of "liberal" from the oldest to the youngest generation.
We can go back and see that approval of police use of force coincided with changes in political ideology, and that increasing disapproval may go back to people born before the great rise in crime in the 1960s.
The same is true for whether courts are treating criminals too harshly. The trend has been ongoing for a long time and preceded the 1960s.
To touch a little on causality between increasing support for leniency on criminals and the 1960s crime rise, we can filter the opinions of people listed as working in law and see the same trend; as a matter of fact, they are even more lenient than the general public. We can also see support for greater leniency coincide with Google ngram mentions of "criminal justice reform" during the period the term was in use.
The good news here is that if you ever wanted to commit a crime, now might be a good time.