Traffic tickets aren't sufficient evidence to show the hours a police officer worked because the information on them is only as reliable as the officer who wrote them, former Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas testified Friday.
Thomas, who retired in 2014, was on the witness stand before Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox to explain why he fired Natasha "Tasha" Sims in April 2013.
Sims has produced five tickets that she says prove the police-car tracking system that formed the basis of her firing is unreliable.
Thomas and another police official said the system that tracked her car was occasionally inaccurate, but not to the extent Sims claims.
Sims was a 17-year department veteran with a reputation as a hardworking traffic control officer who wrote record numbers of traffic tickets. Court records show she wrote at least 2,271 in 2011; 3,386 in 2012; and 690 before she was fired in 2013.
She was terminated after an internal investigation found she had exaggerated the hours she worked to claim overtime pay that she wasn't entitled to receive.
On Friday, she also produced text messages from her supervisors that she said proves she had approval for how she managed her work time.
Her main supervisor, Sgt. Rodney Lewis, was also disciplined for failing to oversee her properly.
Sims is suing Little Rock to get her job back with lost wages in an amount that could run between $170,000 to $401,000.
Overtime pay had doubled her $60,000 annual salary to more than $120,000, she told the judge.
Fox did not immediately rule on whether she should be reinstated, but told both sides they could expect his decision after he compares the records and testimony from Sims' three-day Civil Service hearing to the evidence he's seen over the past 1½ days.
In a separate lawsuit against Thomas and the Little Rock Civil Service Commission over her firing, Sims accuses Thomas of firing her in retaliation for complaints she'd filed with the city accusing him of gender discrimination and creating a hostile work environment.
In court Thursday, Sims and her attorneys argued that the internal investigation into her overtime hours relied too heavily on the Blue Tree car-tracking program, which they claimed was unreliable. The GPS-based system has reported her to be in two places at the same time and shown her car in the Arkansas River, the lawyers said.
Questioned by Amy Beckman Fields, a senior city attorney, Thomas said none of the evidence Sims produced has caused him to doubt the findings of the internal probe.
He's certain he made the right decision to fire Sims, he said.
"I haven't seen anything that causes me to doubt the validity of the investigation. I believe the GPS. I have no alternative."
The investigation accounted for possible Blue Tree discrepancies, Thomas told the judge.
Its reliability was checked against other data that showed Sims' location, reports from the security system that monitored her entrance into police buildings, and the times she checked in over the radio with police dispatchers while making traffic stops, he said.
There was no indication that the Blue Tree system had malfunctioned as often as Sims claimed, Thomas said.
"I didn't believe that, each and every day in question, there could be a problem with the system," he said.
Sgt. Robert Mourot, who conducted the internal affairs investigation, told the judge that, of the 19 days Sims was found to be misreporting work hours, Blue Tree was only inaccurate reporting her location on two occasions and at most by three minutes.
The probe did not rely on her ticket writing because there's no good way to validate whether she wrote those tickets when and where she said she was, Thomas testified.
He said he based his decision to fire Sims on the investigation, her chain-of-command's unanimous termination recommendation and her disciplinary history with the department, which included suspensions for overtime violations and occasions where she was found to be untruthful.
"I looked at her disciplinary history and found similar prior violations," he told the judge.
After Thomas questioned the reliability of Sims' traffic tickets as proof of her whereabouts, her attorney Luther Sutter asked how she would know to forge times and locations more than a year before the investigation into her work hours began.
Thomas said her ticket times would have to coincide with the hours she was being paid to work, but he acknowledged that none of her tickets or arrests have been called into question.
The hours she worked did coincide with the number of citations she wrote, he testified, adding that she had a reputation for her ticket numbers.
Sutter also questioned whether Thomas had made a sincere effort to end the practice of "cuffing," which allows officers to leave duty early while still getting paid for a full shift.
Thomas, who was chief for nine years, said he had discouraged "cuffing" and urged supervisors to follow departmental policies regarding overtime and compensatory time.
But, he said, "cuffing" has been going on since he was a patrolman.
Sims was participating in the informal practice to alleviate overtime costs, he said, but he denied Sims was being punished for that.
Some of Sims' overtime was earned when she worked voluntarily as part of a federal traffic safety program targeting seat belt violations and drunken-driving, Thomas said.
Her overtime pay came from the city, but the money was reimbursed by the Selective Traffic Enforcement Program, he said.
Metro on 11/19/2016