This article originally appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, June 4, 2013: If you think that the American Civil Liberties Union takes on only cases of grand constitutional significance, a quick look at its recent docket from the St. Louis area is likely to change your mind.
Are you allowed to flash your lights to warn an oncoming driver about a speed trap? Do you need to show you’re really talented to perform on the street? Can neighborhood regulations keep a political sign out of your yard?
Those questions and others, foreseen and not, are now the concern of Jeffrey Mittman, who took over last week as executive director of theACLU of Eastern Missouri.
Mittman, 50, succeeds Brenda L. Jones as executive director. He most recently served in a similar position for the ACLU in Alaska. Before that, he was the deputy national field director for the organization’s legislative office in Washington and worked with the ACLU of Northern California on issues arising from the 9/11 terrorist attack.
Mittman told the Beacon that the national ACLU office had determined that Missouri was a fertile area for growth in the group’s fight to protect rights that are guaranteed in writing but not always protected in practice.
“We love what you did in Alaska,” he said he was told. “Do you want to do the same thing in Missouri?”
Sheila Greenbaum, president of the local chapter’s board of trustees, praised Mittman for “his deep passion for civil liberties, coupled with nearly a decade of leadership experience within the ACLU.”
In Alaska, Mittman said he was heavily involved in battling a law that kept people off the sidewalk for certain hours of the day when they could not ask for donations or play music and pass the hat. The effort is similar to the ACLU’s recent victory in winning a preliminary injunction that prohibits St. Louis from collecting a fee from people who want to perform on the street.
The case is a typical one for the ACLU, he said.
“Sometimes the issues are not an outright ban on speech but are at the margins, where the government is trying to nibble away at our rights,” Mittman said. “It’s not the kind of thing where people will generally sue or rise up, but if the ACLU doesn’t protest it, the rights will be eroded.
“They say all politics is local. Civil rights and constitutional liberties are local as well.”
Mittman talked – very rapidly – in the ACLU office in the Central West End. The interview is edited for clarity and length.
When did you become interested in what the ACLU does?
Mittman: I was born in the early ‘60s and my family is Jewish. When I saw what the ACLU did in supporting the Nazis’ right to march in Skokie, I got it right away – wow, this ACLU organization is really neat. It walks the walk.
It’s very easy to see that free speech is good when the issue is something that everybody agrees on. The Nazis are a despicable organization. But our country is great enough to say that free speech is important. If the government can say that some kinds of free speech are not OK, we are headed down the wrong road real fast.
Although there may be people who want to attack us for defending Nazis or defending people who want to say despicable things at funerals, it’s easy to find that one case to represent what the ACLU is all about. When push comes to shove, even those people will agree that the ACLU is necessary.
One of the fun things about being part of the ACLU is that we cover the waterfront of constitutional right and civil liberties. It’s a big waterfront, and we have to be smart about what we focus on and where we spend our time and resources.
Sometimes the way people find their way to us is on specific issues, and that’s OK. Other times, there is a fundamental understanding that people have. In the post-9/11 era, people got right away that this is the kind of time when government can overreach and our freedoms may be threatened. So our job is to keep doing our work in detailed areas but also continue to have a strong message that freedom cannot protect itself. Someday we may be able to work ourselves out of a job, but I think our founding fathers were not too optimistic about that.
Everything is in place to really make Missouri one of our really strong affiliates. There is a desire on the part of a lot of people to be involved with the kind of work the ACLU does. My job is to find people who want to be involved and want us to do more and make it easy for them to do that.
Your work after 9/11 seems to get at the heart of what the ACLU does in terms of protecting people’s rights.
Mittman: I would speak about a time when we were a nation at war and how important it is that the country be united and that those who were speaking out against a strong country were accused of weakening our ability to defend ourselves. That was the dialogue when the ACLU was founded around World War I. We see this repeatedly in our history. There are officials who say they want more power for the long-term good of our country. Our job is to stand up and remind people that we need to protect ourselves, but there are smart ways to do it and there are dumb ways to do it. Taking our liberties to defend our freedom is a dumb way.
The ACLU's “Safe and Free” program really got it right. By focusing on our freedoms, we make sure those people tasked with protecting us are doing their job. We want to be safe and free, and we want to get the balance right. There always needs to be an organization that will say when you make a mistake, we can point you in the right direction.
What we try to do is get across the message of what our country is, one where we have democratic values and we agree to co-exist with a set of rules that applies to everybody.
In St. Louis, a big issue coming up is how local control of the police department will be handled. What will the ACLU be watching for?
Mittman: At the most fundamental level, we want to remember that the history in this country of the war on drugs is that it negatively and disparately impacts minorities.
We have to take as our foundation a real awareness of and sensitivity to a long political history of discrimination against minority communities. When you start from that base, you understand that issues of public safety, policing and public oversight need to be sensitively handled, so we have in place mechanisms to look at our policies. Are we doing things as we have always done them, in a way that may be using stereotypes and bad precedents? Or are we saying that we need to protect everybody? Are we doing it in a way that treats everybody fairly, not targeting one community over another?
We’re working with community leaders and elected officials. Sometimes we accomplish more by being quiet and working behind the scenes, in a way that is transparent. Sometimes we need to make a public statement. There are a lot of moving pieces. The ACLU wants to be at the table and make sure all of this happens properly.
Another area where the organization has been active has been the rights of students. How is that special?
Mittman: Student rights, the rights of young people entering adulthood, is an ongoing issue. We want to recognize that families are very protective of their children and to make sure they have a say in how their children are taught. At the same time, we have a history of school districts around the country that want to censor how children are taught. Instead of educating children, they want to enforce a particular ideology. That is never acceptable. As the Supreme Court has said, students don’t lose their rights at the schoolhouse door.
If you look at which students are being disciplined and which students are being given a pass for bad behavior, unfortunately you have clear data that say students of color or students coming from lower socioeconomic status are more likely to being treated differently from other students. That is something we need to be aware of.
Technology also is an area where issues of rights being enforced equally are becoming increasingly prevalent.
Mittman: Unfortunately, we are finding that our privacy is being nibbled away by technology that is ahead of our laws. Clearly our laws need to catch up with our technology, and the ACLU is leading the way with other organizations in ensuring that our systems catch up.
There are always challenges to getting the balance right. Whether it’s the telephone or tape devices or the internet or mp3's or texting, the technology is going to change, but the principles remain the same. You have to set up a structure that recognizes that we as citizens have rights that should never be violated. Government has to set up rules that are fair and apply to everybody equally, where intrusion is minimal and the right to challenge government action is always there. Those principles remain the same.