The American Civil Liberties Union accused San Francisco Sheriff Paul Miyamoto on Thursday of violating the privacy rights of defendants who have been freed under electronic monitoring by requiring them to allow searches of their person or property and to share their location data with other law enforcement agencies.

Defendants who are released from jail before trial are often required to wear ankle monitors that allow officers to track their locations. But in a class-action suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court, the ACLU and a private law firm said Miyamoto went beyond constitutional bounds by requiring them, as a condition of release, to consent to a search of their body, home, vehicle or possessions at any time. They must also agree to let the sheriff’s office inform other law enforcement agencies of their location at all times.

“Ankle cuffs are supposed to ensure that an individual remains in the Bay Area and shows up for court proceedings,” Shilpi Agarwal, legal director of the ACLU of Northern California, said in a statement accompanying the suit. “They are not a license for law enforcement’s unlimited search and surveillance of vulnerable people who haven’t been convicted of a crime.”

“Stripping away privacy rights is illegal and only tolerated because of the disenfranchisement of those directly affected, who are indigenous and 70% Black and brown,” said San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju, who is not participating in the suit but helped the ACLU identify individual plaintiffs.

The three plaintiffs also objected to the searches but agreed to the conditions of release, the ACLU said, because they were able to go to work, care for a child and attend a high school graduation.

The suit accuses the sheriff and the city of violating rights against unreasonable searches, under the US and California constitutions, as well as the constitutional right of privacy approved by California voters in 1972. It seeks court orders halting the searches and erasing the shared location data .

Tara Moriarty, a spokesperson for Miyamoto, said inmates released under electronic monitoring have waived those rights, allowing the sheriff to “enforce the rules and regulations imposed by the court,” which she said included consent to future searches. “The sheriff details this information to assist the justice-involved individual to successfully complete the (electronic-monitoring) program,” Moriarty said in a statement.

More than 200 defendants are being electronically monitored in San Francisco, and that number is likely to grow as the city attempts to reduce its jail population, the ACLU said. As court backlogs have increased during the pandemic, the organization said, some people have been monitored for a year or more.

In addition to turning GPS location data over to San Francisco police and other agencies, the ACLU said, Miyamoto’s program allows Sentinel Offender Services, a private contractor that has run the program since 2019, to keep the data indefinitely.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko

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The San Francisco Chronicle is proud to welcome its 2022 class of summer interns. Starting Monday, June 13, these standout students will be working on big stories across departments and coverage areas. The interns come from eight colleges and universities and represent disciplines including reporting, video, audio, photography, editing and audience. 

Let’s meet the journalists and their assignments:

Stanford University graduate student Chasity Hale interns with the The Chronicle’s Race & Equity team this summer. 

Courtesy of Chasity Hale

Chasity Hale  
Race & Equity 

Chasity Hale is a journalism master’s student at Stanford University, where she also received her bachelor’s degree in communication and creative writing. She has interned at NPR Music, worked at the Stanford Daily student-run newsroom, and written for various publications, including the San Franciscan magazine and Peninsula Press. Raised in Miami, Hale is intimately aware of the dangers that climate change poses to coastal cities and is passionate about reporting on the environment through the lenses of equity and justice. She is excited to be joining the Race & Equity team this summer. 

UC Berkeley graduate student Elgin Nelson interns with the Food & Wine team this summer. 

Courtesy of Elgin Nelson

Elgin Nelson 
Food & Wine

Elgin Nelson is the newsroom’s Food & Wine intern. Nelson is from Phoenix, Ariz., and is in his second year at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. His studies include longform narratives and photojournalism surrounding the arts. Before graduate school, Nelson interned at VinePair, a digital publication that covers the alcohol beverage industry. He also interned at Firelight Films, where he worked as a research and production intern.

Stanford University undergraduate Emma Talley returns to The Chronicle’s Metro team after interning in 2021.

Courtesy of Emma Talley

Emma Talley
Metro 

Emma Talley is returning to the newsroom’s Metro team this summer. Talley is a rising junior at Stanford University studying communication. She spends almost all of her free time serving as editor in chief of the Stanford Daily. Talley previously worked with The Chronicle’s Metro and Breaking News teams as an intern during the spring and summer of 2021, covering breaking news and education.

Santa Monica College student Ethan Swope interns with The Chronicle’s Visuals team this summer.

Courtesy of Ethan Swope

Ethan Swope 
Visuals 

Ethan Swope is a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker in the San Francisco Bay Area covering local and international news including the war in Ukraine, immigration in Mexico and Lebanon, wildfires in California, and civil unrest in the United States and the Middle East. He strives to tell stories that make an emotional impact. Swope has been on assignment for the Associated Press, Getty Images, Bloomberg and The Chronicle. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Time magazine and international news outlets. The White House News Photographers Association named Swope the 2022 Student Photographer of the Year. He is the recipient of multiple recognitions from the College Photographer of the Year contest, including 2021 College Photographer of the Year Silver. Swope is a Dean’s Honor List student at Santa Monica College where he is studying film production for an associate degree with the intent to transfer. He is thrilled to join The Chronicle this summer and work alongside the talented photojournalists whom he has long admired. 

Northwestern University undergraduate Kikue Higuchi interns with The Chronicle’s Sports desk this summer.

Joshua Hoffman

Kikue Higuchi 
Sports 

Our new sports intern writes: “While I am currently in Chicago, studying journalism at Northwestern University, I was born and raised in the East Bay. I have always been a fan of Bay Area sports; although I haven’t been to a Warriors game since Steph Curry joined the roster. Remember when tickets were only $26? 

“I spent the past three months working remotely with the CNN Sports team, assisting the desk with newsgathering and writing digital articles. At CNN, I had the opportunity to gain experience reporting on some of the biggest events in sports, including the Winter Olympics, March Madness, the Masters and the NFL Draft. At Northwestern, I work with the athletic communications department as an assistant. I write game stories and features for NUSports.com, with a focus on field hockey, women’s basketball and women’s lacrosse. I also handle social media for the same sports, so I got to live-tweet Northwestern field hockey’s win in the 2021 NCAA Championship game! 

“I’m super excited to be back in the Bay Area for the summer after suffering through yet another Chicago winter and even more thrilled to be working with reporters I read all the time!” 

Sacramento State University graduate Jordan Parker interns with the The Chronicle’s Breaking News team this summer.

Courtesy of Jordan Parker

Jordan Parker  
Breaking News 

Jordan Parker joins the newsroom as a breaking news intern. He comes to The Chronicle from Sacramento State University, where he just finished his bachelor’s degree in journalism. Parker spent six semesters on his award-winning college newspaper, the State Hornet, where he won two Associated Collegiate Press awards and led the organization to an Innovation Pacemaker award as editor in chief. Before joining the State Hornet, Parker was the sports editor for his Tracy High School’s student newspaper, the Scholar and Athlete. His work has also appeared in the Sacramento Observer and Sacramento News & Review. Despite growing up in California, Parker is a diehard Boston sports fan and will not answer questions about why that makes sense.  

UC Berkeley undergraduate Joy Diamond is The Chronicle’s Next Gen Critics and Arts Intern for the Datebook section this summer.

Courtesy of Joy Diamond

Joy Diamond  
Datebook

Joy Diamond is The Chronicle’s Next Gen Critics and Arts Intern for the Datebook section. Born in Shanghai but raised in Alameda, she considers herself a Bay Area native and is elated to grow as a writer at the very newspaper she has been following for years. Diamond is entering her sophomore year at UC Berkeley, where she is double majoring in English and film and media studies. As an arts and entertainment reporter for The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s student-run newsroom, she has served as training manager for the department and held the film and theater beats. Diamond also reviews television, music releases, local concerts and regularly interviews local creatives. Her writing has also been published in Alameda Magazine and the Alameda Sun. She enjoys drinking coffee, sewing, playing music and painstakingly chipping away at a feature-length screenplay. 

San Francisco State University undergraduate Leticia Luna interns with The Chronicle’s Audience team this summer. 

Ivan Chairez

Leticia Luna
Audience 

Leticia Luna is the summer intern in The Chronicle’s audience team. Luna is a Brazilian living in the Bay Area. She is spontaneous and enjoys the outdoors. She likes to engage with her community, which inspired her to become a journalist. A proud Laney Community College Journalism graduate, Luna has experienced life in a newsroom in all stages, from staff writer to editor in chief, at the college’s publication — the Citizen. After her internship at The Chronicle, she will continue to pursue her journalism degree at San Francisco State. 

Stanford graduate Melissa Newcomb interns with The Chronicle’s Audio team this summer. 

Courtesy of Melissa Newcomb

Melissa Newcomb 
Audio 

Melissa Newcomb recently completed her masters of journalism from Stanford University, covering issues like education, housing and labor. Her thesis focused on providing a roadmap for women who have experienced sexual assault at a university. A Syracuse, N.Y., native, she is new to the city and is excited to be joining the audio team this summer. In her free time, Newcomb enjoys playing beach volleyball competitively and walking her German shepherd, Winslow.  

Owen Henderson, an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is one of this year’s Dow Jones News Fund Multiplatform Editing interns. 

Courtesy of Owen Henderson

Owen Henderson 
Multiplatform Editing Desk 

Owen Henderson is a rising senior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he studies journalism with minors in Spanish and theater, and he will be one of this year’s multiplatform editing interns under the Dow Jones News Fund journalism fellowship. Before his time at The Chronicle, he worked as the digital and production intern for “The 21st” public radio talk show, a correspondent and host for WPGU News, and an anchor for “Good Morning Illini” student-produced morning show, as well as serving as a contributor and digital intern at Illinois Newsroom and as a producer for the University of Illinois Bands’ podcast “One More Time.” When he’s not working, Henderson can usually be found baking bread or hiking. 

Kent State University undergraduate Reegan Saunders is one of this year’s Dow Jones News Fund Multiplatform Editing interns. 

Courtesy of Reegan Saunders

Reegan Saunders 
Multiplatform Editing Desk 

Reegan Saunders will be joining the newsroom as a multiplatform copy editing intern from the Dow Jones News Fund. A rising senior at Kent State University, Saunders is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a minor in print media and photography. Saunders has worked as a general assignment editor and diversity beat reporter for KentWired. They have also worked as a contributing copy editor for Maggot Brain Magazine. In their free time, Saunders loves to write music reviews and interview local bands in the Midwest.

UC Berkeley graduate student Sabrina Pascua interns with The Chronicle’s Investigative team this summer.

Kori Suzuki

Sabrina Pascua 
Investigative 

Sabrina Pascua is the newsroom’s first intern with the Investigative team. She joins the team after finishing her first year at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. There she studies audio storytelling, multimedia production and investigative reporting. She is also a first-generation student and is a member of the school’s inaugural Dean’s Fellowship. This spring, Pascua worked as a reporter for the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, where she researched labor and sex-trafficking cases. Before attending UC Berkeley, Pascua served as editor in chief of the student-run Mustang News at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and graduated last spring. Pascua is an alumna of the Dow Jones News Fund multiplatform editing residency and a former editing intern for The New York Times. Born and raised in California by two Filipino immigrants, Pascua is inspired to uplift stories from underreported communities like her parents.’  

UC Berkeley graduate student Xueer Lu interns with The Chronicle’s Digital Design team this summer. 

Courtesy of Xueer Lu

Xueer Lu
Digital Design

Xueer Lu is a bilingual multimedia journalist from Wuhan, China. Xueer used to work as a campus fact-checker and data journalist in NJU Factcheck, a student newsroom at Nanjing University. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English in 2020, Xueer worked as a multimedia reporter in Beijing covering business and technology. As she returns to campus for her master’s degree at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, she will be focusing on data journalism and digital design. She’s interested in stories about public policies, social justice and the Asian community.  

And on June 21, we’ll be joined by: 

Stanford University undergraduate Camryn Pak interns with The Chronicle’s Politics team this summer.

Courtesy of Camryn Pak

Camryn Pak 
Politics 

Camryn Pak is a politics reporting intern and a rising senior at Stanford University. She is majoring in American studies with an emphasis in inequality, media and the law. Before working at The Chronicle, Pak served as news managing editor for the Stanford Daily and reported for the Orange County Register. She also interned at the U.S. Department of Justice and hosted podcasts and wrote news articles for GovSight, a nonprofit civic information startup. Outside of reporting, Pak enjoys playing card games, going on morning walks around the city and exchanging music recommendations. 

About The San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfchronicle.com) is the largest newspaper in Northern California and the second largest on the West Coast. Acquired by the Hearst Corporation in 2000, The San Francisco Chronicle was founded in 1865 by Charles and Michael de Young and has been awarded six Pulitzer Prizes for journalistic excellence. Follow us on Twitter at @SFChronicle.

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By Daniel Lazare

After premiering at the New York Film Festival in 1979, this powerful documentary about one of the most dramatic periods in American labor history has been newly restored.

The Wobblies (1979), directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer.

[Screens across the country for International Workers’ Day (May 1). Cities include: New York, Los Angeles, Washington, DC,  Seattle, San Francisco, Detroit, Cleveland, Denver, Austin, Park City, Omaha, Portland, and others.]

Looking for a way to celebrate May Day now that mass demonstrations no longer seem to be in style? The Wobblies might be a good place to start. Directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, it’s been given a full 4k restoration more than 40 years after it came out, and it’s opening up across the country just in time for International Workers’ Day. Although some might be inclined to dismiss it as an exercise in leftwing nostalgia – I confess I was part of that group – it’s in fact a powerful look at one of the most dramatic periods in American labor history. It features people like Roger Baldwin, a leftwing firebrand in his day who went on to found the American Civil Liberties Union, and a dozen or so lesser-known souls declaiming passionately about events in their youth.

The story they tell is about a vast upwelling of class conflict that is now largely forgotten. It takes us back more than a century to the days when America was the economic wonder of the world, an industrial colossus outproducing Britain, France, and Germany combined. To run its mines and mills, it was bringing in 15 million people a year, mostly from southern and eastern Europe. But considering that the country had nothing by way of welfare, unemployment insurance, labor law, or workplace regulations, immigrants who could barely speak English were at the mercy of one of the most rapacious business classes the world had ever seen. A coal-mine owner summed up the prevailing attitude in 1902 when he declared that “the rights and interests of the laboring men will be protected and cared for – not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of this country.”

With God on the side of the bosses, whispering the word “strike” was blasphemous.

It was into this breach that the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies, stepped in 1905. In contrast to the frankly racist American Federation of Labor, a collection of elite craft unions run by the cigar-chomping Samuel Gompers, the IWW organized entire industries from the bottom up without regard to color, ethnicity, or gender. “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common,” the Wobbly constitution declared. “…Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor through an economic organization of the working class.” All the toilets, that is, not merely those who were white, male, native-born, and in possession of certain high-value skills.

Mass strikes erupted from the textile mills of Massachusetts to the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest. The times were not gentle. The Wobblies shows police cracking heads and blasting away with guns. One nonagenarian recounts an astonishing incident in Bisbee, Arizona, in July 1917 when the local sheriff deputized a mob of 2,000 vigilantes at the behest of the Phelps Dodge Corporation, loaded more than a thousand striking copper miners onto a freight train, transported them 200 miles into neighboring New Mexico, and then dumped them off in the middle of the desert. “There were machinegun,” the woman – unidentified, unfortunately – recalls in an Italian accent undiminished by age. “They were gonna shoot if anybody gonna jump from train.”

“1,270-some men,” she adds, “in boxcars – boxcars – like cattle! And then they take them down … to Columbus, New Mexico, without water, without anything.”

“Conditions became worse and worse,” recalls a veteran of an IWW strike in Paterson, New Jersey, the center at the time of the US silk industry. “And there was only one thing to do. You either had to just stop living or become a rebel. And that is when the IWW came in.”

“Agitators, a bunch of agitators are in Paterson,” another woman says. “Agitators! I used to get mad. I said, ‘they’re not agitating us, they just telling us the truth.’”

When 300 Wobblies took the ferry from Seattle to the town of Everett, 30 miles up the Washington coast, to support a strike by local lumber workers, hundreds of vigilantes met them at the dock and opened fire. At least five were killed. “I don’t know how many they shot,” another ex-Wobbly recounts. “Nobody knows. Lots of them went overboard, some jumped, some fell…it was terrible.”

That was in 1916. The next year saw worse as the US entered the war and newspaper headlines blared that the Wobblies were in league with the Kaiser. Repression was massive. The Russian Revolution meanwhile ended up splitting the IWW from within. After all, the Wobbly preamble, true to the union’s anarcho-syndicalist roots, had called on workers to avoid “affiliation with any political party.” Yet the Bolsheviks were a vanguard party par excellence. Lumber camps resounded with debate. “They had terrific arguments in the bunkhouses,” a veteran remembers. “The chairman, he’d get up and open the meeting and … he’d say, ‘Gather round here, fellow workers, we’ve got a goddamn revolution to talk about.’” The next year, 101 Wobblies received sentences of up to 20 years each after being found guilty of preventing the draft, encouraging desertion, and labor intimidation in a mass trial in federal court in Chicago. Membership recovered in the early ’20s, but the overall trajectory was clearly downwards.

The Wobblies is moving and intense, so it’s good to have it back after all these years. But the restoration is not without its poignant side. It would be easy to say that the movie is a reminder that such struggles are never-ending and that we’re all indebted to an earlier generation of rebels for putting their lives on the line. But decades later, we’re left with the uneasy feeling that despite such efforts, conditions have gotten worse, ie more atomized, more commodified, more fractious, and more discouraged. It’s not merely that today’s conditions are more complicated, but that society is losing ground. The Wobblies is not a feel-good movie, and that’s entirely to its credit.

Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic and other books about the US Constitution and US policy. He has written for a wide variety of publications including Harper’s and the London Review of Books. He currently writes regularly for the Weekly Worker, a socialist newspaper in London.

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SAN FRANCISCO – The San Francisco Unified School District took a major step towards reopening schools on Saturday by signing a tentative agreement with a group of unions on health and safety standards for personal learning for students of all grades from preschool to high School has met.

The tentative agreement covers basic health and safety standards, including the return of students to classrooms when the city and county reach the red tier of California’s blueprint for a safer economy, like the California’s, according to district and union officials Ministry of Health and all employees returning to schools or workplaces “had the opportunity (authorization and access) to get vaccinated at the recommended dose,” a district announcement said.

Students could also return when the city and county hit orange or lower, “regardless of vaccine availability,” the district said.

“I would like to thank all of the district employees who have been working for months to get our schools ready so we can get back safely as soon as possible,” said District Manager Dr. Vincent Matthews in a statement. “This agreement would not have been possible without their efforts. I look forward to opening our school doors so more staff can start preparing to welcome the students back. “

Union leaders said a number of items included in the tentative agreement were proposed by workers in December, including helping the district to prioritize vaccines, availability and educate members; Masks and PPE for students and staff; socially distant classrooms and work areas; regular tests for students and staff; Health examinations; Ventilation upgrade and monitoring; a “safe and effective” cleaning protocol; and a contact trace and ladder diagram with the County Department of Public Health.

The availability of vaccine doses remains a problem.

“This agreement creates the conditions for the safe reopening of schools in San Francisco. Now we need city and state officials to reinforce school staff and provide vaccines while the UESF continues to focus on making classroom and timetable arrangements and distance learning for students and families who choose not to even return to keep improving with these standards, ”said Susan Solomon, president of United Educators of San Francisco.

Talks between the district and its unions began in September. The city announced on Wednesday that it would file a lawsuit to obtain a court order to instruct the district and the Board of Education to work out a plan to provide face-to-face learning as safely and as quickly as possible .

“After months of consistently at the table, we’ve known all along that the key to protecting our entire school community and reducing transmission in a school environment would require multiple layers of protection, and we’re confident that this agreement can be made to do exactly that, ”said Caroline Satoda, president of the United Administrators of San Francisco and supervisor in the district’s professional growth and development department.

“Skilled construction workers are ready to reopen learning centers safely and in the best possible conditions,” said Rudy Gonzalez, SF Building & Construction Trades. “We are still aware of the limitations due to underfunding, retention and staffing issues, but we see hope in this agreement. We look forward to receiving assistance from our federal, state, and local leaders in creating learning environments and facilities that are worthy of our students. “

The preliminary agreement “does not address or resolve any negotiable implications of the district’s hybrid teaching plan,” the SFUSD said. “The district continues to meet with the United Educators of San Francisco to finalize negotiations on the negotiable impact of hybrid education.”

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