Cedric Benson: Waterboarded for Boating While Black

One of the most severely under-reported stories in America today is our hair-trigger police forces. Chicago Bears running back Cedric Benson, an African-American, was hosting a gathering on his boat in Texas when he was arrested for what the police call drunkenness and resisting arrest.

Here's Benson's own account as reported by "AFP:"

There was no resistance on my part," Benson said. "Was I drunk? No. . . They gave me a field sobriety test, told me to say my ABCs and told me to count from 1 to 4 up and down. I'm thinking I passed all the tests, did everything right . . . Then the officer told me we needed to go to land to take more tests. I politely asked him why we needed to go to land to take more tests when I took every test. Then he sprayed me with mace . . . I'm not handcuffed. I'm not under arrest. I'm not threatening him. I'm not pushing him. I'm not touching him. And he sprays me right in my eye . . . Nobody saw what he did to me. I started screaming for my mother to come. That's when they put me under arrest. And the officer threw a life jacket over my head.

Once we got to land, the Travis County police grabbed me and kicked my feet from under me. So I landed on my back while I was handcuffed. They held me down and held the water hose over my face. I couldn't breathe. I'm choking. I'm begging the cops, 'Please stop. Please stop.' Then they picked me up and dragged me backward toward their car. And I'm still being polite, asking them, 'Sir could you please allow me to walk like a man to your cop car?' They just kept dragging me on."

The police have a different account, but I'll believe Benson until proven wrong.

In some ways, it's typical police stuff.

There's questioning Benson away from his relatives and guests who might be witnesses:

". . . Nobody saw what he did to me."

Then the police officer took Benson's verbal objection to further testing as an opportunity to spray mace in his eyes:

"I politely asked him why we needed to go to land to take more tests when I took every test. Then he sprayed me with mace . . ."

If Benson's side of the story bears out, the officer was committing an assault and already engaged in a cover up.

Then, the officer took Benson completely away from witnesses so that he and other police could continue to abuse him. This brings us to what's innovative in the police abuse of Benson or at least what I haven't heard of before. Essentially what the cops did was waterboard him.

Once we got to land, the Travis County police grabbed me and kicked my feet from under me. So I landed on my back while I was handcuffed. They held me down and held the water hose over my face. I couldn't breathe. I'm choking. I'm begging the cops, 'Please stop. Please stop.' Then they picked me up and dragged me backward toward their car.

Holding a hose over Benson's face so that he was choking and couldn't breathe is waterboarding and is essentially a controlled form of drowning. That's why waterboarding is defined as torture in both American and international law. Not that being a form of torture would stop American cops. It appears that they're also coming more and more to use tasers as a form of recreational torture.

My question is whether the Texas cops who arbitrarily arrested, abused, and tortured Benson were waterboarding him as a kind of experiment or whether waterboarding had become part of their standard procedure.

The racial angle is also interesting. Hopefully, more of the facts will come out. But it appears at the outset that Benson's biggest crime was being a black millionaire holding a gathering on a nice boat that would fit fifteen people or more. It seems that this was the sixth time Benson's boat has been boarded by police this year.

In other words, Benson was "boating while black."

This kind of policing has its roots in the conduct of white police during the Reconstruction and segregation eras when the police were looking for opportunities to intimidate black men.

Police criminality still seems to be more directed at black people than other groups. Police shootings of African-American males have been an especially serious problem in Louisville, KY and Cincinnati, OH.

Over the last five years however, the cops have developed hair-trigger tempers towards everybody. One of my colleagues made a comment about the high number of police abuse incidents in Lexington, KY and I've heard some ominous stuff from the Morehead State campus. One police officer screamed at one of my colleagues for getting out of his car during a traffic stop. To put the icing on the cake, the officer then filed a complaint accusing my mild-mannered and very short colleague of doing exactly what the cop had done.

It's like the police are looking at the whole American population with the same kind of contempt and hostility they used to reserve for African-Americans. Perhaps the police think that equality means equal exposure to abuse and humiliation rather than equal respect and dignity. But that doesn't make it so.