Travels in San Diego

Looks like the city’s horses are going to fetch much higher prices than expected. More than a month after word leaked out that the longstanding equestrian unit was being axed to save money, the horses finally have been put up for auction on the Public Surplus website . Although similar animals have previously sold in the $2,000 to $2,500 range, the seven geldings already were commanding bids ranging from $3,000 to $4,500 when I just checked a few minutes ago.

That makes me feel slightly better.  It seems like recognition – if a pallid sort – of how valuable the horses were.

I was reminded of that at the end of December, when I talked to Sgt. Bret Righthouse about the bad old days before a cadre of mounted San Diego police department officers began routinely patrolling Balboa Park. That was back in 1994. Transients and illegal aliens had set up permanent encampments; some even built huts on the rooftops of buildings in the park’s central mesa. Illicit sexual activity was rampant, along with drug sales, in the brushy hillsides of the west mesa. Discarded syringes littered the playgrounds, and car theft rings abounded. “It was honestly to the point where I wouldn’t bring my family here,” Righthouse recalled. “Maybe you’d go to a museum for an hour or two, but it wasn’t a park you could just walk in and enjoy.”

When a 24-year-old actor was killed in a drive-by shooting one night as he strolled across the Laurel Street Bridge with his girlfriend, public anxiety skyrocketed. So the police department decided to beef up the horse-patrol unit that had been established in 1983 but which had shrunk to almost nothing by the beginning of the ‘90s. Righthouse joined the squad then; in its expanded form, it included two sergeants and a dozen officers. Working two shifts a day, seven days a week, the equestrian teams roamed the park’s roads and pathways from seven in the morning until 1:00 a.m., confronting criminals, arresting and later re-arresting the same offenders. Soon the park’s resident scofflaws tired of the routine and moved out. “Basically we decimated the crime,” Righthouse said.

He recalled how the early dramatic results in Balboa Park soon caught the attention of police in other parts of the city, and the equestrian unit began making sorties into other troubled areas. The unit streamlined the steps it took to enlist its aid. “All you had to do was make a phone call,” Righthouse said. Little by little, police supervisors throughout the city began to recognize that the cops on horseback could be used “like a city-wide strike force.” In summers the teams patrolled both Mission Beach and Pacific Beach, intervening in one rowdy scuffle after another.  Righthouse says during one long Fourth of July at Mission Beach, the officers stopped counting how many fights they had broken up when the number reached about 100. “The horses would literally run from one problem group to another.” Officers were adept at hand-cuffing suspects from the saddle; they carried the same weapons as any regular patrol officer. One time the troublemakers consisted of a drunken beach crowd intent upon overturning a lifeguard vehicle. The horseback officers dispersed the mob with ease.

Using the horses for such tasks required that the animals be desensitized to sights and noises that would make most horses rear up or stampede: traffic, trolleys, crowds, waving flags, flashing lights, flares, blaring horns, and so much more. “A horse is a flight animal,” Righthouse pointed out. For the police work, that most basic instinct had to be overridden. The animals had to learn to walk up and down curbs painted a variety of colors, all of which might pose a different kind of danger — from the horse’s naïve perspective. They had to ignore manhole covers, climb flights of stairs, negotiate narrow passageways – without balking or panicking. Crowd control long ago was added to the unit’s routine duties, and to handle that, the horses had to learn how to synchronize their movements with other horse teams, as well as officers on foot, who might be aiming — and using – riot guns. “People think there aren’t a lot of political demonstrations in San Diego, but we’ve worked hundreds of protests. We’ve literally lined up and pushed crowds out of the way while people threw rocks and bottles at us.”

Righthouse said his experiences had showed him that “ten horses could move a crowd that it would take 100 foot cops to do….  And the amount of force necessary to move a crowd with a horse is far less than that required by foot officers. We move very slowly; we don’t even touch people.” A horse and rider decked out in riot gear evokes primordial fears of being trampled.  Even agitated, aggressive humans edge away.

Now that the horses are going, all that capacity will be gone (in 8 more days, when the auction closes).  But there’s one more opportunity to view the animals. Their long-time home in the park will be open from 9 to noon tomorrow (Thursday) for inspection by potential buyers (or anyone who pretends to be one, I imagine.) To reach the stables, take Park Boulevard to President’s Way, and turn right at the first unmarked street. The road leads down to the stables area. Bring a carrot.