A new poll conducted by USA Today and Ipsos has found that faith in policing among Americans has risen while support for the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen since the BLM protests and riots of 2020. The survey results come as Derek Chauvin, the former police officer accused of murdering George Floyd and inadvertently setting off demonstrations last May, had his trial recently.
Last June, 60 percent of respondents said that they trust the Black Lives Matter movement to promote justice, while only 56 percent said the same of police. Nearly a year later, only 50 percent still trusted BLM to promote justice, while 69 percent trusted police officers to do so.
While the results were highly divided by race, the trends were not as divided. Trust in BLM has fallen significantly among both black and white Americans. Among African-American respondents, there was a 14 percent drop in trust towards BLM and a 12 percent rise in trust towards the police. Among whites, the level of trust fell by eight points and rose by 12 points respectively
The results also show that Americans are less trusting of police unions than police themselves. Police unions have often been criticized for protecting officers who have engaged in misconduct, a criticism which, in equivalent form, is often targeted towards other unions as well.
The drop in support for BLM may be related to a spike in support for law and order over protesting. While Americans were almost evenly divided in June of 2020 on whether it was more important to maintain law and order or to prioritize protesting, only 31 percent of respondents now say that securing the rights of protesters is more important. Many BLM protests devolved into riots during the summer of 2020, causing over $2 billion in property damage.