Photographs by Simone Lueck
Minneapolis Police Department Mounted Patrol
Once, any city with a police force also patrolled the streets with mounted police. But then cars came along, and mounted police fell out of favor in all but the densest cities. San Francisco and New York still maintain a mounted patrol; so does London, where the horses keep their own Twitter feed. But Duluth lost its mounted force in 2017, and St. Paul retired its horses just this past winter, ending a tradition since 1885. (They’ll be missing from the State Fair this year.)
Minneapolis operates the last licensed municipal mounted police force in the state, with 13 horses, three full-time officers (plus a full-time sergeant), and 28 additional police who have been certified to ride, after a seven-week course. You can see the mounted patrol in action at every major bar night downtown; before, during, and after some Twins games; and at events like the Final Four and Aquatennial. They also patrol after natural disasters, such as the 2011 Northside tornado.
When they’re not clopping down Hennepin, the horses live among the bucolic rolling hills west of Orono. On a cool Friday morning last month, I called up Chris Humphrey, a full-time officer on the mounted unit for 12-plus years, and he invited me to spend the day trailing Minneapolis’s biggest employees (and the only ones paid in hay and clover). They work three to five days a week on intermittent shifts. And they travel to the city in a state-of-the art trailer that Humphrey designed, which contains a sled and winch in case a horse ever has a medical emergency. (The device can also be put into service if the police ever need to move injured cattle or sheep—a situation that presumably does not occur often, but, when it does, makes you grateful you have an ungulate winch.)
Days when they’re not working, the horses spend 22 hours meandering in their green pastures, with a morning and noon visit to the barn for food and medicine. They come inside for extreme weather like the polar vortexes. But otherwise, like dogs, they grow longer coats in the winter and love the cool weather.
It’s not easy to become a Minneapolis police horse. They tend to come from older draft horse lineages that have proved to be exceptionally calm and well trained. When the police purchase a horse or take a donation, they ask for a 30–90 day trial period in case the horse doesn’t take to crowd control.
Horses are the platinum standard in crowd control. Police departments calculate that one officer on a horse has the impact of 10 officers on foot. There’s something in people that is both intimidated by horses and also feels affectionate and gentle toward them, a uniquely disarming combination.
I asked Humphrey to tell me about our herd. There’s Diego, a buckskin gelding who’s “one of our bravest horses; he will literally do anything you need,” Humphrey said. Kristo, almost all white, stands out as the alpha-horse of the herd, and “our most trusted horse—you could ride that horse into a gunfight if you needed to.” Goliath is “a favorite of new riders, because he’s just very nice and gentle.”
Buster has a smooth canter and the herd’s most nimble lateral movements (“He’s just extremely good at getting into tight spaces,” Humphrey said.). Teak can turn on a dime. Max, Humphrey said, “is very people oriented.” Indy, one of the only two mares in the unit, “is spirited and would prefer to go fast over any other speed.” Sedona has one blue eye and loves kids: “I could put my three-year-old on her with no concern at all, she’d be so careful.”
Mounted Patrol
Haven is “super quiet and gentle, and lives for praise.” Easygoing Trooper is the unit’s only purebred Clydesdale. Zeke acts as a fearless and incredibly smart mischief maker. (You can follow the horses on the Minneapolis Mounted Police Foundation’s Facebook page, where you can also buy very cool merchandise.)
On the day that I visited, Cabo, a dark bay, was on the cusp of retirement, with a replacement, Blue, in training. He’d been with the force for a mere two months, but, in Humphrey’s estimate, he was proving a quick study, with the makings of a natural police horse.
A natural police horse is one that can stand in a throng of 500 drunk partiers when there’s a stabbing victim in the middle and remain unflappable. The horse will respond to its rider almost like a continuation of that officer’s body.
“We can move a huge number of people with essentially zero force,” Humphrey told me. “It’s astonishing. You should tell officers in other communities: We can be called in for mutual assistance. There’s a reason police love horses.”
I followed Humphrey and officer Aaron Morrison into north Minneapolis for a patrol with Zeke and Blue. This was part training exercise for Blue and part demonstration for me of a police horse’s other extraordinary ability: community relations.
“There is no better way to connect with the community than with a horse,” Humphrey had told me in advance. “People will cross the street to talk to you when you’re on a horse. They will stop traffic to come and see us. And it’s not just the businesswoman driving down the street. Known gang members will come up and talk to us about the horses. It’s one of the only times we get to have meaningful conversations that have a positive impact on the community that are not centered around a crime.”
Reader, I then saw all this play out before the horses even left their trailer. Humphrey and Morrison had no sooner pulled up into the parking lot in North Commons Park when carfuls of families started whipping U-turns in traffic, pulling into the parking lot, and disgorging kids who wanted to pet the horses.
“You want to know where the softest part of a horse is?” Humphrey asked kid after kid. He directed their hands, then, toward a spot on Zeke’s nose as their parents boosted them up. Sometimes the nervous children kept one hand securely wrapped around their mother. Or, on getting close, they suddenly changed course, yelling: It’s so big!
“No fighting,” said one dad, as his girls split toward the horses. “There’s plenty of horse to go around.”
Eventually, we headed down a neighborhood street off the park, and 11 children—I counted—spurted from two neighboring houses. “Nice to see you guys here on horseback,” said one mom as her children lined up to pet Zeke. “This going to be a regular thing?”
Humphrey said yes, and the whole crowd erupted in shouts of “Cool!” and “Look! Look! Look!”
Officer Morrison served as part of Minneapolis SWAT teams for 15 years before joining the mounted patrol. He’s a gentle, tattooed giant who now spends his spare time rescuing pit bulls (having seen their dire circumstances in different Minneapolis drug houses). Boys from a group home piled out to take selfies with Zeke and Blue. “In a cop car, you never get this response,” Morrision called down to me.
We reached a corner convenience store, and three cars pulled out of traffic to pet the horses. I took pictures of half a dozen people resting their heads on giant police horse muzzles as the officers chatted and local residents talked about goings-on in the neighborhood.
“I can’t even tell you how many shootings I’ve been to here,” Morrison said later, as the horses’ urban shoes clomp-clomped down the avenue. “You get a completely different reaction when you’re on a horse.”
