LAPD horses provide ‘a different way of doing police work’

A cloudy afternoon just outside the Griffith Observatory had a touch of a John Wayne film set — a half-dozen or so Los Angeles Police Department officers in pristine Stetson cowboy hats sat atop horses wearing gleaming saddles with the LAPD’s initials carved into the leather.

The officers were there to announce increased patrols at the observatory after the department investigated a number of vehicle thefts in the area.

Officer Roberto Morales, an eight-year veteran with the unit, was riding Stanley, a bay quarter horse with a white stripe on his face and a long black mane.

“A big part of what we do is community engagement,” Morales said that mid-April day. “We were in Pico-Robertson after the shooting at the synagogue. We were there for about two weeks, and I’ve never seen more kids pet the horses. They’re very calming.”

Many of Los Angeles’ popular tourist attractions are watched over by the mounted police, including stretches of Hollywood and Venice Beach, especially during the summer.

The department’s mounted platoon patrols as above-the-crowd eyes, including at parades, and, the LAPD says, serve as a way to bond with those who might not otherwise approach a cop except for the horse.

The department has always had horses, with a volunteer-based mounted unit for most of the 20th century. Then, in 1987, Chief Darryl Gates ordered the creation of a full-time unit and the construction of its barn.

Now, there are 32 steeds, mostly quarter horses, ridden by a lieutenant, two sergeants and 16 other officers assigned to the unit full time.

“We use the horse for a different mode of transportation,” said Sgt. Eric Rogers, a 30-year LAPD veteran who has been with the horses for four years.

“It’s a different challenge, a different way of doing police work,” Rogers said. “Being out on the horse is nice because we go to every part of the city, from San Pedro to Tujunga to Venice Beach. You get to interact with all different parts of the community.”

Rogers was standing next to the arena at LAPD’s spread in the Glendale foothills that includes that barn, well kept by the cops and two civilian caretakers. There are 40 stalls, washing spaces and offices — with photos, ribbons and news clippings lining the walls.

Name tags for each horse rest on stall doors:  Stanley, Whitewater, Joey, Boston.

Day-to-day, the unit operates somewhat like the others within the LAPD: Officers get assignments, prepare their gear and go into the field.

They are often dispatched to what the department identifies as high-crime areas, including pockets of South L.A. and Hollywood, where the horses act partly as a vehicle for officers to do regular police work and partly as a deterrent.

“People are more comfortable being face-to-face with a human than a 1,500-pound horse,” Lt. Carlos Figueroa said. “They don’t know how it’ll react. We know how it’ll react, because we ride them every day and train with them, but they don’t.”

Last fiscal year, the budget for taking care of the horses and the barn was $138,000, according to information provided under a California Public Records Act. Those funds covered such expenditures as for food, shavings for the stall floors, salt blocks, fly spray and veterinary care. What the unit costs in total is not laid out in LAPD’s budget; for example, the officers’ salaries are in the general budget.

In 2021, the department arrested 269 people, including making 34 felony arrests and 107 misdemeanors. Of those, 63 were for drinking alcohol in public, roughly two dozen for possession of a controlled substance and about 10 for a robbery or a burglary.

That overall figure fell to 81 in 2020 in large part, Figueroa said, because the unit’s 30 or so officers was cut in about half because of budget cuts and to put the officers on traditional patrols.

A key job of the unit is high-visibility crowd control, which came into play in 2020, when the Lakers and the Dodgers won championships, unleashing chaos in downtown L.A. For those assignments, even the horses wore clear face shields and marched in a straight line toward unruly crowds of revelers who refused to leave the area after officers declared unlawful assemblies.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever seen them get that aggressive,” William Gude, a police-watchdog activist who was out there then and has often seen the unit in Hollywood, said about the mounted officers.

“They target homeless people non-stop,”Gude said. “One time I saw them give a guy a ticket for throwing a cigarette on the street. … I feel like they target quality-of-life incidents.”

Lt. Figueroa countered that the vast majority of the time the unit’s focus is not to make arrest for small-time crimes like drinking in public or to clear encampments. He said that the visibility and mere presence of the officers and their horses in areas that experience higher rates of crime is often good enough.

“Traditionally, we’ve had high visibility just because of the horses alone,” Figueroa said. “The main focus is high-visibility, but for us if there’s somebody on the street drinking a beer, that’s not something to focus on so much now.”

Gude agreed that when he sees the horses out in Hollywood, which is most weekends, they don’t tackle much hard crime — but they are often effective in some ways.

“Are they stopping real crime?” Gude figured. “No. Are they going after petty things? Yes. Could bicycle cops do the same thing? Yes,” Gude said. “But kids love them. Kids come up and ask for pictures, and in Hollywood, it’s tourists.”

The horses come from a variety of backgrounds and then are specially trained, making sure they are de-sensitized to high-stress environments and calm enough to work in a bustling city.

“In searching for horses suitable for the program, we’re not looking for a fast horse, we don’t need an athletic horse, we’re looking for the mind,” Figueroa said.

Horses have been used in police work for several hundred years. For all their strength, though, they’re still animals that can make their own decisions.

“Horses are, by nature, flight animals,” Figueroa said. “As big as they are, they run from everything, because it could kill them, because out in the wild they’re prey.”

Their use as police animals has been criticized by some.

Vanessa Shakib, co-founder of the nonprofit Advancing Law for Animals, isn’t keen on how the LAPD is using horses.

“Generally speaking, captive animals are not the solution to human problems,” she said. “Horses are not weapons, they are not machines, and using them as crowd control is an escalatory and dangerous tactic — it’s also unethical.”

Figueroa emphasized that for his unit, the horses are not inherently meant to make contact with people or to be a use of force — they are meant to be a deterrent.

“By and large, if we’re moving folks in a crowd control, (there’s) a 10-to-15-foot buffer,” Figueroa said. “We are not making contact with people unless it’s so large and unruly of a crowd — unless they begin to move through us and don’t care.”