Going Viral for the Wrong Reasons: Employee Accountability Never Logs Off

2026 CALPELRA Annual Training Conference 
CALPELRA2026: Digital Future Human Leadership

CALPELRA's 2026 Annual Training Conference, the 51st annual CALPELRA conference, will be held in beautiful Monterey, California, the week of November 18 - 20.

AALRR attorneys Nate Kowalski, Christina Checel, and also Jennifer Dancho (Eastern Municipal Water District) will speak at the 2026 CALPELRA Annual Training Conference. They will present...

Going Viral for the Wrong Reasons: Employee Accountability Never Logs Off

In an era of citizen journalism, where iPhone videos can be posted to TikTok in an instant, the line between private conduct and public accountability has blurred. In this session we’ll explore how and when a California public agency may lawfully discipline employees for speech, behavior, and online activity that occurs far from the workplace but reverberates back into it. We’ll examine the applicable legal standards and constitutional protections, as well as the evolving expectations for public employees in the digital age, and bring this topic to life with an actual scenario the session’s speakers experienced in real time that required quick and strategic decision-making in response to a fast-moving digital crisis. While sharing the decisions the agency made after one of the agency’s employees got into a racially charged, off-duty confrontation with a member of the public, we’ll discuss the key decisions the agency made in the days following the incident, including initiating a workplace investigation, updating employees regarding the event, communicating with the agency’s board, crafting external communications to mitigate reputational harm, and safety and threat management. You’ll learn the importance of having a policy to address off-duty employee conduct; you’ll learn about the constitutional and statutory protections employees have when they engage in protected activity; you’ll learn how to identify the nexus between private, off-duty conduct that creates a detrimental impact on agency interests or employment duties; and you’ll learn best practices for internal communications when an employee’s social media post puts your agency under the microscope.

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