WINSTON-SALEM — A former Mocksville police detective who says he and two other officers were fired for raising concerns about how the department was being run testified Monday that he felt it was “going downhill at a fast pace.”

“I felt like the department was up and coming and we were headed in the right direction,” Jerry Medlin said in a June 2009 letter to Mocksville Town Manager Christine Bralley. “If something is not done to fix these problems, we are going to be an example of what not to be.”

Medlin was the first of the three officers to testify in a lawsuit being heard in U.S. District Court. They sued in 2012 and are seeking at least $100,000 each in damages and their jobs back for wrongful termination and other complaints.

Medlin and two other former officers, Maj. Ken Hunter and Lt. Rick Donathan, say Bralley and former Police Chief Robert Cook violated their free speech rights by firing them in December 2011 because they had called the governor’s office to share their concerns.

Town officials have denied the allegations. Cook retired as police chief in 2013.

During three hours on the witness stand, Medlin described instances of what he called problems with the department.

Medlin said those included an officer showing up for duty under the influence of drugs, another officer stealing from a supply closet and yet another officer slamming a woman to the floor of a department store. In another instance, Medlin said an officer made an inappropriate comment to Medlin’s wife during a phone call. He said none of the officers faced any discipline for their actions.

Medlin also told attorney Robert Elliott that a clerk at a convenience store where he stopped told him he’d just missed Cook buying a 12-pack of beer while in his squad car.

“We are going downhill at a fast pace and nothing is being done to stop it,” Medlin wrote in 2009.

After expressing his concerns to Bralley in the letter and in a meeting, Medlin was demoted one month later to patrol duty by Cook, although he was later reinstated to his detective role. He said Cook told him the demotion was due to his job performance and because he wasn’t cooperating with fellow officers.

Elliott presented Medlin’s personnel record into evidence, and it showed there were no complaints about his job performance.

Medlin said the three officers met with the Davie County chapter of the NAACP, whose leaders said they weren’t big enough to handle the complaint on their behalf, and they weren’t sure that the state chapter could handle it, either. He said they also turned to the Attorney General’s Office, but were told it was not that office’s job to investigate police departments.

Medlin said Donathan remembered that then-Gov. Beverly Perdue had said in a commercial that if anyone knew of corruption in government that they should call her office. Donathan called and was told either a person in Perdue’s office would call the State Bureau of Investigation, or he could do it. He said he let the governor’s office handle it.

“I felt good about what we had done,” Medlin said. “I felt someone was going to do something to help us for once,” although he said the officers were concerned about losing their jobs.

Medlin’s testimony followed opening statements, which came after a jury of seven women and one man was seated before a lunch break. One of the women was eventually excused from duty. Testimony was expected to continue at 9 a.m. Tuesday.