SEATTLE — The Seattle Police Department’s recent decision to eliminate its Mounted Patrol Unit is more about the ongoing staffing crisis than erasing a relatively small line item from the agency’s proposed $458 million budget next year, Seattle City Council members were told Tuesday.
With the number of deployable officers down 30 percent from a high of 1,336 officers in 2018, the two members of the mounted unit — a sergeant and an officer — are needed elsewhere, Angela Socci, the department’s executive director of budget and finance, said in a presentation before the council’s select budget committee.
She noted the police department has eliminated other units in the past few years, including traffic enforcement and its community police and anti-crime teams, to contend with the staffing crisis. Meanwhile, there are 101 fewer detectives in investigative units — including homicide, robbery and gun violence prevention units — than there were in 2018, Socci said.
“It’s a harsh reality and one that we have struggled with in the last few years,” Socci said of decommissioning the mounted unit. “I think the time has come. Given the city’s overall revenue challenges, it seemed appropriate to make this decision.”
Though eliminating the mounted unit will save the department an estimated $230,000 next year and $237,000 in 2026, interim Seattle police Chief Sue Rahr noted that the costs of feeding and training the unit’s five horses and one pony and operating the stable in West Seattle’s Westcrest Park are “very expensive.”
“There are layers and layers of responsibilities to properly care for and respect these animals,” Rahr said. “And over the years, the Seattle Police Foundation, through some very, very generous donations, have, quite frankly, helped us limp along so we could say we have a mounted unit.”
The foundation, a nonprofit founded in 2002 in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to support and raise awareness and funds for the Police Department, stepped in the last time the department sought to disband the mounted unit, nearly 15 years ago.
As recently as February, the Seattle Police Foundation raised more than $14,000 toward the purchase of police horse Callum, a 6-year-old Gypsy Vanner gelding who joined the unit in April. The horse was named after Callum Robinson, a renowned Australian surfer and lacrosse player who was fatally shot with his brother and friend in a suspected carjacking in Mexico last spring, the BBC reported.
Cherie Skager, the foundation’s president and CEO, did not return a phone call Tuesday seeking comment.
It remains to be seen what will become of police horses Callum, Blue, Chance, McLovin and Doobie and pony Li’l “Buzz” Sebastian.
While the unit’s sergeant and officer “will be assigned to other police duties,” Socci said, officials are working on a decommissioning plan, “one that takes into account the horses, use of the facility and the civilian support staff within the unit.”
Though the mounted unit at one time aided in crowd control and patrolled downtown streets and city parks, they’ve most recently been used solely in community outreach and engagement, Rahr told council members.
“People love the horses. I mean, you can’t not love the horses,” she said. “I’ve had to make some very painful, unpopular decisions about services that we can no longer provide and looking at the bigger picture, I believe that we have to be honest about what we have the capacity to provide.”
Rahr said other police agencies affiliate with private organizations to provide horses and riders for ceremonial purposes, likely a reference to the riderless horse with backward-facing boots in its stirrups that has long been a part of tradition-laden memorial services for officers killed in the line of duty.
She promised a “slow, thoughtful process” to rehouse the unit’s mounts, noting that some of them were donated and so the donors will need to be consulted. Rahr also pointed out there are numerous organizations that use horses to provide therapy to veterans and children.
“I just think there is a more upfront, honest way to use these horses, and I don’t want to continue to portray that we have the capacity to credibly provide a mounted patrol,” Rahr said.
Jim Ritter, a retired Seattle police officer and founder of the Seattle Police Museum, said the department has had horses on and off since at least the 1880s. The mounted unit was disbanded following the 1934 Longshoreman strike, in which officers on horseback were photographed herding striking workers toward paddy wagons along the railway tracks on what eventually became Alaskan Way.
The negative optics from that incident meant there wasn’t a mounted unit for nearly 40 years, until it was resurrected in the early 1970s, Ritter said.
The Police Department tried to disband the mounted unit after the 1999 World Trade Organization protests and again in 2010, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, which squeezed city coffers. Both times, the public backlash and, in the latter instance, the emergence of private donors, caused a course reversal, Ritter said.
“You have to ask yourself, politically, what’s the real purpose of having these horses? Is it PR? Is it civil unrest? Is it both?” Ritter posed. “Obviously, the public likes the horses so maybe that’s worth it. But the chief has to look at a variety of different things and maybe she can’t justify having it.”
But if history has proved anything, Ritter said, it’s that public input could affect a final decision.
“The city is going to make the motion to disband the unit and you’ll have public input that has other ideas,” he said. “It just matters how strong the public opposition is to disbanding the mounted unit to start having some city leaders scratching their heads, and going, ‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea politically.’ “
“They did last time,” Ritter said.
A public hearing on the proposal to disband the mounted unit is scheduled for Oct. 16.
