I ended up taking a look at the polls mentioned in that article. The one from Data for Progress (the source of the 10% number for tragic accident, some numbers from other surveys indicate to me the number is probably higher than that) has pretty leading questions.
> On May 25, 2020, an unarmed black man named George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis. An officer knelt on Floyd's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds before he died. Which of the following comes closer to your view: [the choice to add the facts that Floyd was unarmed and knelt on for that long to the question is quite heavy-handed for a survey and sure to influence the respondent]
and
> Which comes closer to your view on recent protests:
>
> These sorts of protests will continue unless we solve the root cause of the problem. We need long-term solutions to poverty and violence.
>
> The first priority is ending the protests and violence, which means we need more police officers and national guard to calm the situation down
>
> Don't know
> [this question pretty assumes the respondent agrees that poverty is the root cause of what's going on]
as compared to the YouGov survey which has a much more neutrally worded set of questions (and a much larger set).
It's therefore not surprising that the YouGov survey records more opposition on some questions that seem similar in spirit to the questions that dataforprogress.org does.
But the two surveys taken together do provide information that does floor me, which is that the overwhelming majority of Americans (indeed around 90%) are convinced that the police officers in this case did something wrong and should've been fired (although they might be not be all convinced of the severity of the offense, but everyone seems to agree it's at least essentially manslaughter).
So you're right! Floyd's death itself is hardly a scissor issue.
The scissor issue instead seems to be the protests themselves. Again I much prefer YouGov's question here to Data for Progress, which asks
> Do you think these protests have been motivated more by a genuine desire to hold police officers accountable for their actions or a long-standing bias against
the police?
And the numbers there are
> A genuine desire to hold police officers accountable: 43%
> A long-standing bias against the police: 40%
> Not sure: 17%