A fired Little Rock police officer showed a Pulaski County circuit judge on Thursday traffic tickets she said discredit some of the accusations that led to her termination for misrepresenting work hours and collecting excessive overtime.
Natasha Sims said she'll return to court today with evidence that will clear her of more of those accusations -- in the form of text messages from supervisors approving how she managed her work hours.
Sims said the internal investigation that resulted in her April 2013 firing did not look at any of the evidence she took to court Thursday. Sims testified that she had to gather the materials herself using the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.
Sims, who had been on the force for 17 years, told the judge that she has never cheated the city out of even an hour's pay and never made any adjustments to her work schedule without the knowledge and permission of her supervisor.
She testified for about two hours Thursday in her lawsuit to get her job back and be paid the wages she's lost in the 3½ years since her firing, based on her annual $60,000 pay, which reached about $126,000 with overtime.
Her attorneys have not offered exact figures for what they believe she's due, but have estimated that it's $170,000 to $401,000, after taking into account the $40,000 she's earned working as a private investigator.
The range depends on whether Judge Tim Fox decides Sims also is entitled to restitution for the overtime she would have worked.
A review of her overtime by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette showed that Sims was paid for 984 hours of overtime in 2010, 1,959 overtime hours in 2011 and 1,500 overtime hours in 2012.
Sims' attorneys, Luther Sutter and Lucien Gillham, said Sims, 50, built a reputation in the Police Department for hard work and reliability as a traffic enforcement officer who also is trained in accident reconstruction.
But she's been wrongly vilified as a thief who's been stealing public money, the lawyers said.
Sims is being persecuted, but all she's done is what almost every other police officer has done when they've been allowed to take off from work early under an informal police practice called "cuffing" or "cuff time," the attorneys said.
"Cuffing" is tolerated by the police administration because it's a way to keep overtime costs down, they said.
Officers who are "cuffed" get to leave work early while still getting paid for working a full shift, all with the knowledge and permission of supervisors, who can be sergeants or lieutenants.
Officers get "cuff time" to repay them when they work extra hours without claiming overtime, the lawyers told the judge. A similar unofficial practice for sergeants is called "early days."
Sims said she could not disprove every allegation against her because the paperwork she submitted to her supervisors is gone, either lost or destroyed as part of the "cuffing" practice.
Sims will return to the stand at 9 a.m. today to conclude her testimony before resting her case.
City attorneys Alex Betton and Amy Beckman Fields said they have two witnesses, Sgt. Robert Mourot, who conducted the internal investigation, and former Police Chief Stuart Thomas, who made the decision to fire Sims and is the named defendant in her reinstatement lawsuit.
Sims has a separate suit against Thomas that accuses him of firing her in retaliation for complaints she'd made to the city's human resources department accusing him of sex discrimination and harassment. Thomas retired in June 2014.
The internal investigation documented 19 occasions over eight months between August 2011 and April 2012 in which Sims violated the city's overtime policy. The policy restricts officers from working more than 16 hours a day, except in special circumstances.
On some of those occasions, the investigation showed she was at home, but Sims said she sometimes worked from home, completing paperwork to document drunken-driving arrests. Other times cited by the investigation, she said, she wasn't at home.
To determine her location, investigators relied on a tracking system used by the department to monitor the location of its patrol cars.
Sims, who was assigned a take-home car, said the system was notoriously faulty, testifying that it had once shown her to be in two locations at the same time.
Three other officers also testified that the "Blue Tree" system in use at the time was unreliable.
Sims, who lives in another county, presented five traffic tickets that showed she couldn't have been home on those occasions because she was in Little Rock writing citations.
For example, on Nov. 22, 2011, the tracking system showed she was at home at 3:02 a.m., but at 3:20 a.m., she was 29 miles away at University and Asher, writing a ticket.
Metro on 11/18/2016