A 25-year veteran lieutenant with the San Antonio Police Department was arrested off-duty and booked into the Bexar County Adult Detention Center on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. Helotes police officers took 47-year-old Benjamin Paul Flores into custody Sunday, and he was released the same day on a $1,000 bond.
Flores, who was assigned to SAPD's patrol division at the time of his arrest, was charged with driving while intoxicated, a Class B misdemeanor under Texas law, according to a department news release cited by KSAT. He has now been placed on administrative duty while SAPD conducts an internal administrative investigation into the arrest, running alongside the criminal case that Helotes police and Bexar County prosecutors will handle independently. Helotes is an independent municipality in northwestern Bexar County, roughly 16 miles from downtown San Antonio, with its own police department separate from SAPD.
Ninth SAPD Arrest of the Year
The case marks the ninth SAPD officer arrested in 2026, according to KSAT's ongoing tracking of department incidents. It follows a string of off-duty arrests this year, several of them alcohol-related and handled by outside suburban agencies rather than SAPD itself — a pattern the station's reporting has repeatedly flagged as a growing concern for the department.
Just two months earlier, SAPD Patrol Officer Raymond Ramos III was arrested off-duty for a Class B misdemeanor DWI after allegedly crashing a vehicle while carrying a half-drunken bottle of liquor in his pocket, an incident Hoodline previously reported as the sixth SAPD officer arrest of the year. That same month, former SAPD officer Zeth Scott turned himself in to Bexar County Sheriff's Office deputies on charges tied to an April 2025 crash in which he allegedly drove into a light pole, a case that had already led to his termination from the department, the station's report notes.
Legal Stakes and Prior Discipline
Under Texas Penal Code § 49.04, a standard first-offense DWI carries a range of 72 hours to 180 days in county jail, fines up to $2,000, and a license suspension of 90 days to a year, per the Texas Department of Transportation. Separate state traffic penalties of $3,000 to $6,000 can also apply upon sentencing. The charge can be enhanced to a Class A misdemeanor — punishable by up to a year in jail and $4,000 in fines — if testing shows a blood alcohol concentration of 0.15 or higher, or it can trigger a mandatory six-day minimum jail term if an open container was in the vehicle, according to FindLaw's summary of Texas Penal Code § 49.04. It remains unresolved whether blood or breath testing was conducted in Flores' case or whether any enhancement will apply, and SAPD has not said whether it will pursue formal civil service suspension proceedings as its internal review moves forward.
Under Texas Local Government Code Chapter 143, municipal police chiefs in civil service cities like San Antonio can issue an indefinite suspension that functions as the legal equivalent of termination, subject to appeal before a civil service commission or independent hearing examiner, per Justia's summary of the statute. That mechanism was used against 18-year SAPD veteran David Grant McCall, who was indefinitely suspended in March 2026 after an on-duty crash into a suburban front yard in August 2025 where his blood alcohol concentration reportedly reached 0.238 — nearly triple the legal limit, as detailed by the San Antonio Express-News. Hoodline has tracked other Chapter 143 cases involving SAPD discipline in recent months.
A Department Under Scrutiny
The Flores arrest adds to a broader pattern of scrutiny facing SAPD's handling of drunk driving, both among its own ranks and in its enforcement practices more broadly. Internal disciplinary records from January 2026 showed two San Antonio police officers received administrative suspensions after failing to arrest a suspected drunk driver and instead letting him drive 40 miles home, according to reporting reviewed by KSAT. That same month, Hoodline reported on a separate off-duty SAPD arrest, in which an officer was arrested in Castroville on a family assault charge and placed on administrative duty pending review.
On the enforcement side, SAPD officers made 114 DWI arrests citywide during the 10-day Fiesta festival in April 2026, department data reviewed by KSAT showed — a total that nonetheless represented an overall drop in drunk driving arrests compared with prior years. The City of San Antonio has said officers placed on administrative duty following arrests face internal affairs reviews that run in parallel with, but separate from, their criminal cases, evaluating whether civil service regulations or department general orders were violated. No further details on the administrative investigation into Flores have been released.
