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.”