Richard Perry/The New York Times A mounted police horse greets the people in Times Square.They are as woven into the fabric of Times Square as the Armed Forces recruiting center, or at least the Naked Cowboy. They pop up regularly around the Coney Island Boardwalk, outside Rockefeller Center, at Yankee Stadium, and at many of the street demonstrations that form a regular part life in New York City.
They are the New York Police Department’s mounted officers — sometimes called “10-foot tall cops” by Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly — and they belong to one of the biggest mounted units in the country. But they have not been immune to the fiscal pressures that have led a number of cities to stop policing on horseback.
New York’s mounted unit has shrunk considerably over the last decade: it now has 79 police officers and 60 horses, down from the 130 officers and 125 horses it had before, Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne said. During that same period, the department as a whole lost 6,000 officers through attrition: there are now 34,820 members of the force.
The unit (see video) is still the envy of many other departments. At a time when other cities — including Philadelphia, Boston and San Diego — have retired all their police horses, New York’s are still going strong, even with reduced numbers. The department has developed its own feed for them. Under Mr. Kelly, the department stopped accepting donated horses and began buying its own horses to ensure that they would conform to standards. And the unit is still an elite one, giving police officers something to strive for.
Mr. Browne said called mounted officers “tremendous ambassadors of good will,” adding, “I’d hazard to guess that our horses are photographed more often than Kim Kardashian.”
The added height and visibility that the horses give their riders works both ways, he noted: it allows officers to see what is going on in a wider area, but it also allows people in that wider area to see the officers. That helps deter crime, and it also helps people find officers when they need them, as happened last May, when two street vendors in Times Square sought help after they saw smoke rising from what turned out to be a crude car bomb. “They looked around, and the first thing they saw of anyone in authority was two mounted police officers, who responded and cleared the area of bystanders before the bomb squad arrived,” Mr. Browne said.
Supporters of mounted patrols mourn their dwindling numbers, and fault overzealous oat-counters at the nation’s city halls. Romantics have a nostalgic attachment to them. And many police officials value them, saying that when dealing with crowds, one mounted officer is as effective as 7 to 10 officers on foot, that their highly visible presence on patrols can deter crime, and that their popularity with the public offers a welcome change from the mistrust and cool community relations many departments must battle.
But others see police horses as a costly bit of sentimentality, more show horses than work horses. They note that police officers cannot go very fast by horse, that in crowd control situations horses have been known to trample or injure people, and that officers assigned to horse patrols cannot do the bread-and-butter work of responding to emergency calls. As many departments face cutbacks and layoffs, the mounted units have come to be seen as a luxury.
Mr. Browne said that fiscal constraint did not put the biggest crimp in the size of New York’s mounted unit. “Henry Ford did,” he said. “Before horseless carriages became so ubiquitous, the N.Y.P.D. had as many as 800 horses on duty a day.”
Comments are no longer being accepted.