I was talking with a friend of mine this weekend, he is an auxilliary Sherrifs Deputy for the mounted patrol. The county budget has slashed funding across the board. The mounted patrol took a huge hit.
My friend owns and cares for the horse, he gets paid a nominal sum per diem whenever he comes out for concerts or football games when they use the horses. He had a few mandated classes and training but isn’t a full time Deputy, he doesn’t carry a gun. When things get really serious they call in the full time cops for any arrests.
I certainly agree with the earlier posts about police horses’ versatility and usefulness.
Someone asked about the penalties for harming a police horse. Under Ohio law, harming or killing a police animal of any kind (horse or dog… don’t think they have police cats, chimps or emus around here) is a crime just one level less than if a human police officer were the victim of the particular offense (killing, felonious assault, aggravated assault or simple assault). Cleveland’s mounted unit has undergone some budgetary slashing in recent years, but is still around, I think.
Interesting to see, on the London Metropolitan Police website, the eyeshields on the horse in the crowd-control situation. I guess the eyes would be a police horse’s biggest vulnerability, wouldn’t it?
I used to see the Baltimore mounted police out around the inner harbor pretty frequently in the summer. There was little need for crowd control on those days, but they were damned nice days to be out on your horse!
In all seriousness, they do need to get riding time in addition to crowd control days. As mentioned, it takes a while to build up a relationship with the horse. For the rider, you need enough practice that you give every cue to the horse instinctually rather than thinking “okay, gotta’ scoot left without turning or going forward–that would be a leg yield which means I’ve gotta get an inside bend, apply the inside leg, steady with the outside rein…” In addition, riding muscles aren’t easily built or maintained through other activities. To ride well, you need to ride frequently. The horses also need regular training and exercise.
They must be very well trained. I’ve read about the spook-proofing programs they run, but I didn’t know how impressive they were till I saw some patrol horses standing quietly in the inner harbor while they were shooting off the canons on some tall ships that were docked there. Big canons going BOOM every few minutes. People were jumping and spooking. The horses couldn’t have cared less.
I once saw three mounted officers ride up and put the breaks on a group fight that was breaking out on a Saturday night on Sixth Street in Austin. A squadron of cops swarming though the crowd in riot gear would probably have caused the whole thing to escalate, but the three mounted officers shut 'em down muy pronto. It was very impressive.
The department I work for has a full mounted unit (I’m not on it). There have been several times when they defused & dispersed a very large, angry, drunken crowd, that was on the edge of riot. 12 horses did what 30 officers on foot could not do.
Worth every cent if you ask me.
I’m still not giving up my gun!
Please don’t! We need cops to deal with assholes, sometimes assholes have guns, so cops need to carry guns. I guess that in a society without assholes, we wouldn’t need cops who wouldn’t need guns, but we’re not quite there, are we?
Horses are actually pretty delicate creatures. The muzzle, frog of the hoof, legs, eyes and so on are very sensitive, and the hide is generally thin and easily cut or torn. Ask any horse owner about barbed wire/fence splinters/glass shards/broken plastic buckets etc.
However, horses are also somewhat dumb and trusting in humans, and if trained adequately will go through all sorts of horrors for their riders. This includes being pelted with bricks and molotov cocktails, stabbed, slashed, etc.
During the Miner’s Strike and the Trafalgar Square riots a lot of horses were injured to the point where they had to be killed, but you can buy and train several horses for the cost of putting a single cop on a disability pension, so it’s still cost-effective.
This leads me into the question I was going to ask…do the horses have the same “official police officer” status that police dogs do; ie, if I go Mongo and punch the horse, is that assault on an officer?
