Kate Adams was hired by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department in 1994, and by March 2020, she had worked her way up to Chief of Police for the City of Rancho Cordova in California. Her time in the position, however, was short-lived, as Adams was forced to resign the following year after allegations that she had been sending racist messages to friends and coworkers came to light.
In a 2013 texting conversation with a friend, Adams sent two images, writing, “Some rude racist just sent this!” One of the images depicted a white man spraying a young black child with a hose and contained a superimposed offensive racial epithet. The other message included an image of a comedian, with superimposed text containing an offensive racial slur. The friend responded, “That’s not right.” The same images were later sent to another friend and co-worker, LeeAnnDra Marchese.
In 2019, Adams was informed of potential misconduct by Marchese, which Adams forwarded to the Internal Affairs Division. Subsequently, anonymous complaints were lodged regarding Adams, but none were substantiated.
In July 2020, Adams filed a formal complaint of harassment and retaliation against Marchese with the County’s Equal Employment Opportunity office. During the investigation, Marchese provided printouts of the text messages that Adams had forwarded in 2013, but did not provide the surrounding text commentary from Adams. Later, the first friend provided his cell phone to Internal Affairs, showing the 2013 texts. The Department gave Adams a choice to either resign or be (in her words) “terminated and publicly mischaracterized as a racist.” An attorney for the County told her that if she agreed to resign, the investigation would never become public; however, if she refused to resign, “the investigation would fuel a ‘media circus’ in which she would be labeled a racist.” She chose to resign in September 2021.
The images got out and in 2022 the president of the Sacramento Chapter of the NAACP published an open letter regarding Adams, which was picked up by the Sacramento Bee. Adams resigned from her adjunct teaching position and two prospective employers ended their consideration of her.
Adams filed a lawsuit against the County of Sacramento, raising eight different claims. The only claims at issue in Adams’s subsequent interlocutory appeal were her First Amendment claims, which had been dismissed with prejudice by the district court.
The district court held that “sending racist images, along with Adams’s disapproval of the images – as Adams described it – was not speech on a matter of public concern because Adams made no allegations that her speech concerned either racism in her community or racism in the police department.” In its initial dismissal, the Court recognized that Adams’s speech was not on a matter of public concern “because the speech was intended to be private and did not relate to the personnel or functioning of the Department.”
The central issue was whether Adams’ speech, made while acting in her capacity as a deputy sheriff, was on a matter of public concern, and thus protected by the First Amendment.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling. The Court recited the Pickering standard for determining whether speech was made on a matter of public and private concern, and ultimately concluded that Adams was commenting on a matter of personal interest. Thus, her speech was not protected by the First Amendment, and the County had not violated her constitutional rights in forcing her to resign over the texts.
“The distinction we have drawn between personal and public interest applies even against the backdrop of controversial issues like racism. To be sure, protesting racial discrimination is a matter of public concern ‘where an employee speaks out as a citizen on a matter of general concern.’ Speech that addresses the topic of racism as relevant to the public can involve a matter of public concern. However, speech that complains of only private, out-of-work, offensive individual contact by unknown parties does not. Whether Adams was privately sent offensive, racist images outside the workplace, without more, is not a matter of public concern within the meaning of Pickering. The content of her private communications to her friends did not protest generally applicable ‘policies and practices’ she ‘conceived to be racially discriminatory in purpose or effect.’ When made, the texts involved a private matter – her receipt of offensive images transmitted by an anonymous sender, Adams has failed to establish the content factor required in a Pickering First Amendment retaliation claim.”
Adams v. County of Sacramento, 116 F.4th 1004 (9th Cir. 2024).