mountedpolice
Officers Lisa Rakes (front) and David Johnson of the Lexington Mounted Police Unit.photo by: Emily Moseley.
Lexington, KY - On a nippy winter morning in downtown Lexington, Coolavin Park on West Sixth Street is empty of baseball games or Frisbee tosses. Instead, three members of Lexington’s Mounted Police Unit are riding horses with hooves the size of dinner plates in figure eight patterns, snorting steam against the city’s skyline.
The unit’s headquarters on West Sixth Street allows them easy access to downtown streets, where unit supervisor Sergeant Ellen Sam says they are a useful extension of the police department’s patrols.
The mounted officers’ high vantage point on these large horses (who must measure at least 16 hands, or 64 inches at the shoulder) makes them well-suited to crowd control work. The horses can also maneuver tight city streets and alleys better than patrol cars, and give the police better visibility in the community.
“It’s high-visibility patrol, and that in itself can be a deterrent. The nice thing is, a lot of time, unlike with patrol cars … even if [people are] not outside, they can hear the horses. The steel shoes on the pavement –– you can’t mistake the sound, and for some people that’s nice to know the police are there,” Sam said.
She also believes the horses help officers seem more approachable.
“Animals are always good icebreakers,” she said. “The horses here are no different.”
Patrolling the streets day in and day out is not a job for just any horse. Traffic, unpredictable noise and crowds would prove daunting for most horses’ flight instincts to resist, but police horses must also be ready to intervene during a confrontation.
Sam tells the story of a fight one officer stopped downtown.
“The way he broke up the fight between the two people was literally using his horse’s head to split the two parties apart,” she said. “They were so intent on each other that they weren’t hearing anything else, and all of a sudden this big horse head split between them.”
Although mounted officers carry less equipment than those in patrol cars, they tend to be tall and fit, making them heavier than the average rider, which can sometimes result in back problems for light horses.
According to Sam, smaller horse breeds like Thoroughbreds and quarter horses had been used in the unit for years but recently have been swapped out in Lexington and other cities for taller, heavyset draft horse crosses. She was sorry to see the last quarter horse leave the program, but reports that the draft crosses are handling their heavy loads better and have an easy-going disposition that keeps them relaxed downtown.
Founded in 1982, the Mounted Police Unit started with one officer but rapidly grew thanks to community support. Until last year the unit included eight officers, one sergeant and 10 horses; when city funding was reduced in July, the unit shrank to four officers, one sergeant and six horses.
Three of the horses currently in the program were donated; while they receive many calls offering free mounts, only about 20 percent are accepted into the program after rigorous screening.
“Once a horse comes in here, it will probably be a year before he is turned over to a rider,” said officer Lisa Rakes.
Despite its small size, Lexington’s mounted unit has received national recognition at the North American Police Equestrian Championships, a competitive riding test for officers and their horses.
The unit’s downtown stabling facilities, which include a 12-stall barn and indoor arena, occasionally attract passersby, who wander into the paddocks and barnyard. Fortunately, most people who come by seem to have made friends with the horses and have even alerted officers when they are concerned one might be sick or hurt.
Lexington’s unit receives funding for additional horse and rider education from The Friends of the Lexington Mounted Police, a 501(c)3 founded to support the group. The group helps organize two public sensory clinics, where citizens can take their horse through an obstacle course of unique objects and stimuli, similar to the courses police horses are trained on to become “bombproof.”
While many major cities’ mounted police departments have been shut down because of funding in recent years, Sam and Rakes hope Lexington’s unit will stick around.
Sam said that in many cases it is cheaper to continue to fund a mounted police program than it is to shut it down and have to reacquire facilities and equipment later on, as has been the case for Philadelphia’s unit, which anticipates a $3 million price tag to revive the program.
“I think we have a lot of support here … I hope we can keep that presence for the city. We’re a great ambassador for the city of Lexington. All the tourists … and downtown merchants get to see us,” Rakes said.