Of all the Baltimore Police Department?s rides ? from patrol cars to vans, boats to motorcycles ? there?s only one who bows on command and sleeps beneath a disco ball.
His name is Flair. He?s excellent at crowd control. He?s partial to Skittles.
“My horse does fancy things,” said Officer Kelly Steinhorn, walking up to Flair?s deluxe wooden stall and feeding him an apple.
Flair and four other horses make up the equine half of the department?s mounted unit ? a sixth horse is out on rotation, relaxing on a Kingsville farm. Every morning, after a breakfast of molasses and oats, they?re saddled, strapped up and taken to the streets by the unit?s officers, patrolling for crime.
“It?s a good deterrent,” says Sgt. John Ambrose, who heads the unit and rides the tan-and-white Barney. Ambrose and his officers said that deploying the mounted unit is sometimes enough to curb a neighborhood?s crime spike, as criminals get familiar with theclip-clop and take off when they hear it.
Ambrose took a stroll Tuesday afternoon through the barn, which tucked next to an impound lot downtown in the shadow of I-83, introducing the fleet of horses. Flair?s background is in dressage, which might account for the bowing. Frankenstein, so named for his broad forehead and the fact he joined the unit on Halloween, came from Amish country. Then there?s Barney, reportedly a laid-back horse and traditionally the best in the barn, whose stall is at the end of the aisle. He craned his neck to watch Ambrose and the doling out of peppermints, then kicked at the wooden slats of his stall to hurry things along his way.
“You?re going to get some! Hold on,” Ambrose called.
The department?s mounted unit is small, a fraction of the size it once was, but the officers who ride say its potential is powerful.
Horses can march down sidewalks and streets and fit in alleys too small for patrol cars. They can line up and slowly, all together, move back a crowd. They?re trained not to spook and run when a bottle flies past.
And sometimes when people walk up to pet the pretty horse, Officer William Phelps said, they discreetly whisper a crime tip.
But for all the mounted unit?s work ? which has gone from posing in tourists? photos to combating prostitution at Patterson Park ? it?s limited by its size. Mounted officers head to crime areas in pairs, which means there?s only so much of the city they can cover.
“It would be a lot better,” Ambrose said, as Phelps tilted his head against Frankenstein?s neck, “if we were bigger.”
