In March, a jury awarded former St. Louis police Sergeant Heather Taylor $300,000 after finding that police department leaders retaliated against her for speaking to the media.
Now the city is trying to get that money back.
The City Counselor's Office filed a motion for a new trial not long after the verdict, and last month, the city introduced a new gambit. They say that Taylor is in possession of 400 audio recordings, some of which would have been relevant to the trial but that Taylor didn't disclose. They say Taylor wrongly concealed the audio files — leading to “serious violations” of its “discovery rights.”
The motion is the latest example of the hardball tactics being deployed by City Counselor Sheena Hamilton, who was appointed by Mayor Tishaura Jones but has been willing to take tough positions that don’t always jive with Jones’ public image.
Taylor gained a high profile with local journalists and activists for speaking out about racism in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department as head of the union representing Black officers. In 2020, she retired and said she was moving to Florida — only to be brought back by Jones as deputy director of the city's Department of Public Safety. Now another Jones appointee is seeking to claw back the money she was awarded.
In its filing, the city states that the jury reached the $300,000 award after hearing testimony from Taylor in which she gave her "impressions of conversations and interactions" she had with supervisors, but that the jury would have benefited from hearing recordings of the conversations themselves, which Taylor possesses.
Taylor brought the original suit in 2017, saying that she’d spoken to St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger a year prior in her capacity as the president for the Ethical Society of Police. Messenger's article described how the police had turned off its Shot Spotter gunfire-detection technology because, as Taylor said, “the bill hadn’t been paid.”
Taylor alleged that department leaders retaliated against her for speaking to Messenger, even though many white officers had spoken to the press in a similar manner without reprimand. Taylor said that she was ostracized within the department and generally demeaned by supervisors, talked over, interrupted and forced to raise her hand to speak at meetings.
Attorneys for the city say that one recording is of a meeting that Taylor had with a St. Louis police lieutenant colonel during which park rangers aired grievances to their supervisors. During the trial, Taylor testified she was treated like a child by the lieutenant colonel. But the city says the recordings show the lieutenant colonel acted appropriately. (In their own court filings, Taylor's attorneys say the tape of the meeting actually bolsters Taylor's account, rather than contradicting it.)
The recordings came to the city's attention earlier this year when Taylor made them available to attorneys representing Milton Green, a Black former St. Louis City police officer who was shot by a colleague. His attorneys then disclosed them to the city.
In Green’s case, the city argued that the white officer who shot Green has qualified immunity, protecting him from repercussions of the shooting. Green's civil suit, which a judge dismissed in March, is on appeal.
Now the tapes Taylor provided are part of the city’s argument that her case was wrongly decided. But Green’s attorney believes it was the city who erred in not obtaining them sooner.
"They should have asked her for these things years ago," says Javad Khazaeli of Khazaeli Wyrsch, who is representing Green in the suit filed more than four years ago.
"These are documents the city had an obligation to ask their employees about in the Milton Green case," Khazaeli says. "They failed to do that. When the employee [Taylor] decided to do the right thing and produce them, they punished her for it."
Court filings made by the city accuse Taylor of concealing the recordings during discovery, though they make no mention of explicitly asking for such materials during that phase of the suit.
Taylor's attorneys call the city's arguments about the tapes disingenuous. The city, for example, makes a point of noting that the recordings capture Taylor saying positive things about Chief Sam Dotson to a reporter upon Dotson’s retirement, suggesting it undercuts her current criticisms of him. But Taylor's attorneys point out in their filings that it would have been "grossly inappropriate" for her to do otherwise. Her "bland statements of well-wishes" don't disprove the discrimination she faced, they say.
The court filings only describe in detail a handful of the 400 recordings. The contents of the others are not publicly known, though one court filing made by attorneys for the city says that the "vast majority of them appear to be conversations between her and other officers or citizens."
"None of the recordings produced to [the city] include any indication that any of the other individuals were aware they were being recorded or consented to being recorded," the city wrote in their filing, adding that some of the recorded conversations appear to be ones in which Taylor was not one of the speakers.
The city itself has frequently been under fire for not making disclosures of its own. Most recently, the Detention Facility Oversight Board, which is supposed to oversee jail operations, said that the city's head of corrections should resign in part for withholding records.
"The city does not routinely produce documents they are required to," Khazaeli says. "This is a pattern and practice."
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