When they first left the precinct, Sergeant William Pinkava repeatedly warned Officer Eduardo Delacruz to drop whatever moral obligations he carried, then begged the officer to make the arrest of the first homeless man they found as part of a citywide crackdown on vagrants.

“I told him,’ Eddie, if you don’t make the arrest you’re gonna get suspended,'” Sergeant Pinkava testified. “He said, ‘Pinky, I don’t care. I refuse to arrest an undomiciled person.'”

Sergeant Pinkava was one of two officers to testify in disciplinary hearings yesterday regarding Officer Delacruz’s refusal to handcuff a homeless man sleeping in a parking garage off Union Square in November 2002. Officer Delacruz was suspended 30 days without pay for his alleged insubordination. He stands to lose his job and pension.

“We had thought 30 days without pay was enough punishment – the man has five kids,” said Norman Siegel, the civil rights attorney who’s been flanked on the defense table by a pair of unusual legal allies, Mitch Garber and Gregory Longworth, tough-nosed attorneys from the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.

In yesterday’s hearing, the unlikely defense team continued to make its case that Officer Delacruz’s order was not properly given and had been “staged” by precinct brass.

A department lawyer, David Green, countered that the officer violated orders by refusing to arrest and should be subject to further punishment.

But Mr. Green’s case began not with argument, but with an apology. For reasons he could not explain, Mr. Green said a bundle of internal documents from the Homeless Outreach Unit during the week of Officer Delacruz’s suspension had disappeared.

Mr. Siegel questioned the vanishing papers as suspect, to which Mr. Green replied, “There is no attempt of deception here, the documents are simply missing and nobody knows where they are.”

The most dramatic moments came when Mr. Garber began a piercing and at times thunderous cross-examination of Sergeant Pinkava, prompting Mr. Green to object to Mr. Garber’s booming voice as “an insult.” The point was to elicit testimony that higher-ranking officers had conspired to force Officer Delacruz into making the arrest.

Before their shift, Sergeant Pinkava said he received a phone call from off duty Lieutenant Neil King, who’d given him orders to suspend Officer Delacruz if he failed to make an arrest.

Lieutenant King also called another sergeant on duty, Frank DiPreta, who testified that he was asked to shadow Sergeant Pinkava as a “witness.”

Asked if he thought it “weird” to be asked by an off-duty superior to witness an officer refusing to arrest a homeless man, Sergeant DiPreta said it was not. He said Officer Delacruz’s suspension was the only he had ever heard of in the Homeless Outreach Unit, a division first designed for empathetic cops who volunteered for the position.