The truth about what happened to Bears running back Cedric Benson aboard his motorboat Saturday night on Lake Travis — whether he was drunk and disorderly, as the police who arrested him allege, or whether he was harassed and abused by the authorities, as Benson asserts — eventually may emerge inside a courtroom.
But what’s already clear is Benson, by choosing to park his boat inside the lake’s most popular cove for drinking and partying, placed himself at the center of an ongoing police crackdown on drunken boaters along the 64-mile-long lake, which was formed by a dam along the Colorado River.
Alarmed by a spate of 22 boating fatalities in the last three years — more than half of which involved alcohol — enforcement officers of the Lower Colorado River Authority and other agencies have stepped up their patrols and the random safety inspections that give them a pretext to check the sobriety of boat operators.
Devil’s Cove, also known to Lake Travis regulars as “the party cove,” long has been a particular focus of the authorities because of the hundreds of boaters who pack into the 300-yard-long niche each weekend to lash their vessels together into giant floating party rafts.
That’s where Benson’s new 31 1/2-foot, $147,000 motorboat was parked Saturday night when an LCRA officer approached and asked to perform a random safety inspection.
LCRA officials say they will not release any details about the Benson incident, but they deny police abused Benson or that he was singled out for special scrutiny. “It’s routine to stop people on the water for safety checks,” said Krista Umscheid, an LCRA spokeswoman.
So far in 2008, LCRA officers have performed 184 safety inspections, issued 47 citations and arrested two people for boating while intoxicated, one of whom was Benson.
Several boaters randomly interviewed Tuesday evening on Lake Travis said the LCRA officers generally are respected as responsible law enforcement officials. Although the City of Austin Police Department has been the subject of scrutiny over racial-profiling complaints in recent years, no such complaints have been made about the LCRA police, according to the Texas ACLU and other civil rights watchdog groups.
LCRA statistics indicate that of 457 total arrests made by LCRA police between 2004 and 2008, 94 percent of those arrested were white, 2.2 percent black, 2 percent Asian and the rest were unclassified.
