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ST. LOUIS — Milton Green finds himself in an awkward position.

For more than a decade he had been a proud member of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. He had passed the sergeant’s exam and was hoping for a promotion. Like other police officers, he had worked under the protection of a legal concept called qualified immunity, which, in most cases insulates law enforcement officers and the agencies they work for from legal liability, except for in narrowly defined violations of civil rights.

Then, in 2017, he was shot by a fellow cop. It was one of those sorts of shootings that some police officers refer to as “lawful but awful.� On the night of June 21 that year, Green was off-duty and outside with a neighbor working on his car at his home in north St. Louis when suspects fleeing police ran by. There was shooting, and Green retrieved his police revolver, and sought to help the officers who were chasing the suspects. An officer ordered him down to the ground. He complied. Once another officer recognized him, and asked him to walk toward him slowly, after the shooting ended, Green complied again. As he was walking toward a fellow officer with his badge out and gun pointed down, Green was shot by another officer arriving late to the scene, Christopher Tanner. The bullet landed in Green’s forearm and caused permanent damage to his arm. Green is no longer a police officer. When I first interviewed him, two years after the shooting, he said he felt abandoned by the department he loved.

“If I was white, I feel like I would have been taken care of,� he told me then. “That’s how I feel.�

Now, six years later, here he was sitting in federal court listening to attorneys for the city of St. Louis use qualified immunity against him. The department didn’t take care of him then, and now it is fighting his attempts to seek compensation for being shot and having his career ended.

“The shooting of Mr. Green in hindsight is undeniably tragic,� said deputy city counselor Andrew Wheaton in a hearing before federal Magistrate David Noce. The city is seeking summary judgment in its favor in a civil rights lawsuit Green filed two years after he was shot. The shooting was also “objectively reasonable,� Wheaton argued. “If qualified immunity doesn’t apply in this case, then it never does.�

Those words stung, Green said. If the judge agrees with Wheaton, the case will be tossed.

“It was sickening to listen to after all the stuff I’ve been through,� he said. “I feel abandoned. I used to work for them and now I wonder who’s on my side?�

It’s a fair question. In today’s hashtag world, who backs the blue in a case in which one cop shot another?

Like Green, Tanner is no longer with the department. Neither is Roger Engelhardt, the lieutenant that headed up the Force Investigative Unit that investigates all police shootings in the city. Whether that unit did a comprehensive job in investigating Green’s case, and other police shootings, is a major issue in the case.

The city has an answer to that question, but it doesn’t want the public to know what that answer is. At some point after Green’s shooting, the police department ordered an audit of the unit’s investigations of police shootings. Green’s attorneys didn’t know about it until Engelhardt mentioned it in a deposition. He, too, was seeking a copy of it, in his own employment dispute with the city, according to court records.

In court this month, one of Green’s attorneys, Jack Waldron, said that audit, which the city has filed under seal, and other internal affairs reports that the city hasn’t yet produced, are key to proving whether the city has been “deliberately indifferent,� in police shootings. When Waldron mentioned the audit in open court, Wheaton objected and discussion of it ended.

So the next day, I filed a Sunshine Law request with the city seeking a copy. The city, notorious lately for its slow response to open records requests, replied in about five minutes. It denied my request, calling the audit a personnel record. That answer doesn’t square with the fact that the Force Investigative Unit regularly published its reports of police shootings upon turning them over to the circuit attorney’s office. If those reports are public, why shouldn’t an audit of those reports also be public?

It begs an important question. What is the city trying to hide?

That’s a question Green wants to get answered, and perhaps it will come to light if his case ever makes it to trial. Noce has not yet ruled on the motion for summary judgment. Meanwhile, Green finds the entire situation disrespectful and depressing. He worked as a police officer for more than a dozen years. Now he has to fight for basic records as the city seeks to avoid responsibility for the shooting that ended his career.

“You might as well say I never worked for the city,� Green says. “That’s how they’re treating me.�