Americans have a history of supporting causes in the abstract, then retreating.

By Andrea Benjamin @ WashingtonPost.com, June 11. She is an associate professor of African and African American studies at the University of Oklahoma, is the author of "Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections: Elite Cues and Cross-Ethnic Voting."

[....] There may be reasons for optimism among those who, like me, believe strongly in curbing police violence, but we should also be cautious in interpreting the polls. Declarations of a revolution in American consciousness are premature. For one thing, polls also reveal that a surprisingly high proportion of people thought that police behaved reasonably in response to the protests — despite the footage of the violent clearing of Lafayette Square, the shooting of journalists with pepper guns and the countless baton-beatings that police dish out.

The split in the polls on whether the protests were violent or peaceful is striking. The Post-Schar School survey found that 43 percent believe that the protests were mostly violent and that an identical share think they were mostly peaceful. Opinions diverge sharply by ideology, with 70 percent of liberals saying they were mostly peaceful and 60 percent of conservatives concluding they were mostly violent. In fairness, a majority (66 percent) thought that neither the police nor the protesters but “other people acting irresponsibly” were responsible for the violence.

Still, fully 50 percent of those polled say the police used an amount of force that was “about right” on peaceful protesters, compared with 44 percent who think they used too much. In the case of people who vandalized or looted, the public wanted the police to get tougher: 47 percent think more force was warranted. And in an ABC News-Ipsos poll, 52 percent agreed that — as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) proposed — the military should have been sent to cities that saw violence and looting [....]