When was that? Because in 1977 they defended Nazi's free speech to demonstrate in a town that had jewish people as half its population so it tried to block them, and I don't recall them doing anything nearly that controversial since.
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-skokie-case-how-i-...
Alternative framing: Given limited resources and lots of things to care about, they pick the specific cases that best improve the freedoms they're interested in protecting.
In the case of the Second Amendment, they decided to let the NRA handle it, as that seems to be working just fine.
The ACLU should defend people who suck ass and another group should defend the heroes who beat their ass for saying awful shit.
So maybe you pick the anti-ICE protester instead of the Nazi to help out. Both got shot with pepper balls, both had their rights infringed upon. Why not pick the one who isn't a complete ass to establish the same precedent with?
They've explicitly said the opposite.
https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-speech-w...
2023: "We joined Young Americans for Freedom, the Cato Institute, and other unlikely partners in filing an amicus brief on behalf of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in its challenge to New York’s new law regulating 'hateful conduct' in social media."
The Second is probably the amendment least in need of defending by the ACLU. It's well covered, and pretty much a third rail of American politics.
2018: the ACLU supports the NRA's First Amendment challenge to Governor Cuomo's attempt to convince NY financial institutions not to do business with the NRA.
2019: they defended a conservative student magazine which was denied funding by UCSD.
2020: they filed a brief supporting antisemitic protestors picketing a synagogue on the Sabbath. They also supported a Catholic school's religious right to make religious-based choices in hiring and firing teachers.
I'm just quoting the fruits of five minutes of research here, so I won't go on (but there's more). Is it possible that you're reacting to the radical conservative stereotyping of the ACLU rather than the actual actions of the organization?
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
I think this is particularly noted as a post-2022 shift
Cops -did- show up. "Did you have a green light" "I did." Less than 30 seconds of questions. Goes to the other driver, same, is back in under a minute. "Well, he said he's absolutely sure he had a green light, so I'm citing you for failing to obey a traffic signal".
There were no cameras in the area, no witnesses, just the two drivers. But the other driver was a 50 something male, and my step daughter was 17 and upset because it was our car. So the cop took his word and cited her.
Hmm, vehicle black box? If that showed that she had come to and been at a stop, and then accelerated, that would at least imply she had been at a red light, and gone when it turned green, as she said.
No, no interest there. Even the insurer (fine, whatever), said "unless we're facing a six digit payout, we're not pulling the black box".
Don't even start me on the fact that after our insurance denied liability, the other driver sued her in small claims court for $10,000 for a car that had a KBB of $1,450. And the small claims judge noted that he technically couldn't sue a minor in small claims, but required us to go to mandatory arbitration, where the arbitrator said, quote, "I don't understand why, as a decent human being, if insurance will pay out, you don't just accept the claim." (Yeahhhh, filed a complaint about that, too. And here I stop, because I feel my blood pressure rising lol).
It's not just auto insurance. Every government, government adjacent and highly regulated process is just like that.
It's not about right and wrong or fairness or making the responsible party pay or saving the children or protecting the environment or preventing sub-prime loans or enforcing building code or or whatever the alleged pretext is. It's about having an efficient process turn the subjective into the quantifiable and/or assign financial responsibility and do so in a manner that's not flagrantly wrong so often that a "large enough to be a problem" amount of people seek recourse outside the system (like smoking the CEO on the sidewalk or armoring a bulldozer or whatever).
But of course, marketing the system as though it's about right and wrong or fairness or whatever is what they do as a means toward what the point actually is so it's easy to understand why you think it failed instead of worked perfectly.
The only problem with the license plate readers is that the "teens" drive cars with fake tags. They deliberately copy the plate numbers from some granny with the same model. Makes it fun when the SWAT team knocks on Granny's door.
- is trivially defeated by teenagers
- is used by police departments as evidence to legally justify violent raids for property damage
- whose data is mishandled by law enforcement agencies who don't do due diligence
... should have more widespread adoption and support?