There's a difference between stating an opinion ("The Exeter police are corrupt") and making a statement like "Police Chief John Doe took a bribe to overlook a

There's a difference between stating an opinion ("The Exeter police are corrupt") and making a statement like "Police Chief John Doe took a bribe to overlook a crime." You can write an op-ed insinuating that based on your sources, the corruption at the Exeter Police Department goes to the top. It's something else to defame an individual specifically. For example, it's defamation to say "analyst74 raped and murdered a girl in 1993" unless I have at the minimum a good faith belief that that was the case. To reiterate, it'd be protected speech to say like you just said that "corruption is a massive problem in American police forces." It's not so much protected speech if you accuse Officer John Doe of specific criminal acts in public if the statement isn't true. For other reasons, this is not the best defendant just from a character perspective the ACLU could pick for this kind of situation (https://www.seacoastonline.com/news/20180531/exeter-man-charged-with-defaming-police-chief https://www.seacoastonline.com/news/20180531/exeter-man-char...). To actually challenge the law, they'd have to somehow reframe what he said as an opinion. Obviously the cops aren't going to bring charges for the vast majority of these kinds of instances, but they did against Frese because he's a felon with a history of harassing the local police. And not a cute and cuddly felon either: he ran over a traffic worker after threatening to run him over. It's fine for the ACLU to take this as a test case but this is not this sort of situation that is a great test case.