A high-ranking police officer, speaking on background, has come out strongly in defense of the department, and says the fired officer who claims her superiors ordered to lie on the stand is lying now.

He tells KRMG that the story told by Kendra Miller, who was fired in 2009, has no merit whatsoever and that her account of giving recordings to the police and the FBI with audio of agents and Special Investigations Division officers ordering her to lie on the stand is not true.

He strongly defends the department and the actions of the officers involved in the investigation into Miller's activities, which led to her termination.

He further backs the city's decision to seek to overturn an arbitrator's decision that would have reinstated Miller as a police officer.

Meanwhile, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 93 in Tulsa worries that the city's decision to get a binding arbitration decision overturned in court could have ramifications for law enforcement officers, firefighters, and other union members throughout the state.

Clay Ballenger is President of the FOP Local 93.

He says he can't comment on the specifics of the case involving Miller.

"I won't get into the details on her discipline and the actions she's accused of, I'll just give some perspective of where we're at," he told KRMG.

"We want to make sure everyone understands the Fraternal Order of Police has a duty to represent its members according to our collective bargaining agreement that signed with the city," he said. "Our job is basically to ensure that a police officer that's been disciplined has due process and the right to go to appeal a disciplinary decision to an arbitrator. And that's spelled out in our contract, which the city signed and we signed."

He added that "actually, there's language in our contract that says by signing the agreement and agreeing to go through the grievance process through binding arbitration on discipline, that both parties waive any rights to litigate or otherwise contest the last answer rendered in the grievance process, which was the arbitrator's ruling in this case."

That, he says, is not what happened.

"What really concerns us right now is we have this agreement between the city and the Fraternal Order of Police that we both signed, and a neutral arbitrator heard all the evidence and made a fair and impartial decision, and now in my opinion, the city has gone outside of our contract and appealed that, and we feel like both of us have waived that right if we go through the rights steps to get that arbitrator's decision, and we did that."

But TPD and the city maintain that even the arbitrator's ruling finds that Miller violated Rule and Regulation #8, Conduct unbecoming an Officer or Police Employee, and Rule and Regulation #11, Use of Department Vehicles.

While the arbitrator found that "since I did not uphold the City with respect to the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Seventh reasons and in light of Miller's superior performance evaluations, I find that discharge was too severe," a police spokesman says the finding itself violates the arbitration agreement.

In that agreement, Section 7.9, it states in part that "The arbitrator shall have no jurisdiction to establish provisions of a new Agreement or variation of the present Agreement or to arbitrate away, in whole or part, any provisions of this Agreement or any supplement thereto or amendment thereof."

Gerry Bender is the attorney who argued to overturn the arbitration in district court.

"Once he found there was just cause for the termination, or the action that the city took, the discipline the city imposed, he had no right under the contract or under his duties as an arbitrator to modify the punishment that was assessed by the city," he told KRMG.

And for the first time, Bender directly addressed Miller's allegations concerning TPD officers and FBI agents.

He called all of her claims about being told to lie and commit other crimes patently false, and said her own statements in the arbitration hearing condemn her on the count of conduct unbecoming an officer.

Miller admitted to a relationship with a known criminal suspect, he said.

"This department and this city does not want a police officer on its police force carrying a weapon on duty that's going to associate with a criminal element."

As for her recordings, he said they simply don't pass the evidentiary test. "There isn't a federal court or a district court in this nation that would accept that as valid evidence," he told KRMG, saying she has no way to prove whose voices might actually be on the recordings.

Miller says she's not done, and she will continue to fight for reinstatement.