DANNY WICENTOWSKI
File photo of Heather Taylor.
Today in St. Louis City court, a jury awarded Deputy Public Safety Director Heather Taylor a $300,000 judgement, more than five years after she brought a lawsuit against the city claiming she was retaliated against for speaking to the media.
Taylor filed the suit in August 2017 when she was the President of the Ethical Society of Police, a union of Black police officers.
Taylor's suit says that in 2016 she spoke to St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger in her capacity as ESOP president for an article Messenger wrote about how the department had turned off its Shot Spotter gunfire-detection technology because, as Taylor said, “the bill hadn’t been paid.”
Taylor's suit said that she was retaliated against for speaking to the media even though many white officers had spoken to to media in similar manner without any sort of reprimand.
After dozens of trial dates getting scheduled only to be pushed back, the case was finally heard in front of jury starting last week.
The jury reached its verdict this afternoon.
Taylor was an officer with the SLMPD for more than 20 years, including eight years working as a homicide detective. She retired from the department in 2020 and became the deputy public safety director for the city in April 2021.
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