La. Police Department Disbands Mounted Unit over Money

By Quinn Coffman

Source The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La.

King, Reaux and Lady have been put out to pasture. The aging horses are enjoying their retirement.

With a shrinking budget, the Baton Rouge Police Department disbanded its Mounted Patrol Division at the end of 2024, saving an estimated $50,000 a year.

Assigning more officers to the two-officer mounted unit was hard to justify, since the department already is understaffed and the equine division was seeing less use in recent years, Police Chief Thomas Morse Jr. said.

While the horses will no longer trot the Spanish Town parade route or let children give them a hug, they will be living out the rest of their lives alongside their former partners.

The mounted patrol's beginning

Sgt. Isreal Chatman's first time riding a horse on his own was in a Southern University Homecoming parade. He was 5, and his horse's name was Flicker.

"I remember it like it was yesterday ... and everybody was amazed that this little baby was on this bull-sized horse," Chatman said.

Growing up, riding horses was Chatman's favorite pastime. As a young man, his goal wasn't to buy himself a nice car but to make enough to get a horse of his own.

He never thought he would one day return to riding in parades as a uniformed Mounted Patrol officer.

But when former Police Chief Jeff LeDuff decided to reform the Mounted Patrol in 2007, Chatman was tapped to be one of the first members.

An earlier Baton Rouge mounted division had been created briefly in 1984 before being disbanded in 1987 over costs. But the department's history with horses dates back to the end of the Civil War. In those days, providing your own horse was a prerequisite to becoming an officer.

In the modern era, mounted officers were deployed for crowd control, missing persons and community outreach.

With the division's latest inception in 2007, four officers were selected, including Chatman and retired Sgt. Mary Ann Godawa.

Funded through a grant, the division supplied itself with four horses from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where the officers spent weeks training with their new equine partners.

The horses themselves were crossbreeds between Percherons and thoroughbreds, which Godawa said combined the friendliness of the former with the athleticism of the latter.

"So they were perfect, absolutely perfect for police work," she said.

Training consisted of exposing the horses to the conditions of crowded events. They used pool noodles, water and a 6-foot beach ball to train the horses for the distractions they would face while working in crowds.

"That was something they loved to do, they would play with that ball all day," Chatman said. "They saw that ball and they knew it was play time."

The exercises prepped the horses to use their bodies to push against crowds and not panic at the resistance. In crowd control situations, officers will turn their horses and use their wide flank to push people back, a maneuver called a sidepass.

"One of these horses is equal to eight men on the ground," Godawa said.

Mounts also had to become accustomed to gunfire, so they would be taken to a pistol range. As shots rang out at the range, riders had to calm their horses, slowly walking them closer to the noise until they weren't frightened.

During training, officers also learned the horses' personalities. Some were stubborn, some were sweet. To make a partnership work, the officer and the animal had to complement each other.

Chatman was first assigned to Stand By Me, a mare with a white face.

"But Stan' had this will ... she was the boss, and I'm the same way," he said. "One of us was gonna give, and it wasn't gonna be me."

Meanwhile, Godawa was partnered with What About Bob, a more mellow mare. The trainer noticed the clash of personalities and switched the riders.

"The rest is history, Isreal and Bob were a perfect match, and Stan and I were a perfect match," Godawa said.

Building a bond

That perfect match became a perfect partnership, which lasted the rest of What About Bob's life. Over the years, the two became inseparable.

"She can feel me adjust my weight, and before I do anything, she's already moving that way," Chatman said. "I can feel when she sees something, when she gets tensed up."

Each morning, officers would visit the department's stables to give daily care to the horses, which also worked as a money-saving measure. The horses were fed, groomed, bathed and ridden around the paddock. This helped build trust between rider and horse.

"They can feel when you're having a bad day, just like you can tell when she's having a day," Chatman said. "I get ready to put a saddle on her and she can give me this little look of defiance, like 'today is gonna be rough.'"

Many days the patrol would visit a school or nursing home. They would show off horses' gaits, explain the Mounted Patrol's responsibilities and let residents get close to the animals.

They also worked football games, parades and block parties, where officers did crowd control, surveyed the crowd from the saddle and made connections with the community.

The officers found that the horses also made them more approachable for people who wanted to covertly leave a crime tip.

Chatman recounted some of his adventures with What About Bob: boxing in a drunken man who was riding his own horse into crowds at the Spanish Town parade, looking for missing persons in the woods and discarded evidence along highways, and even witnessing gunshots from atop his saddle.

The decision to disband

As the city faced a budget crunch of more than $40 million following the transfer of taxes to St. George, the police department was asked to trim $9 million from its budget.

The disbanding of the Mounted Patrol Division will save the department between $50,000 and $60,000 annually, Morse said. But cost wasn't the only motivator.

"When I took over last year, it was down to two officers in there full-time with three horses," Morse said.

In addition, the division's remaining horses were getting old, so new ones would need to be bought and trained. And overtime had to be used for officers to give the horses their daily care.

"Do we invest the manpower and money in this division to keep it going and do it right, or do we just go this different direction and disband the division altogether?" Morse said.

Still, the funds saved are dwarfed by the $400,000 saved by discontinuing the department's ShotSpotter program this year.

Mounted Patrol memories

Stand by Me was retired eventually to Godawa, but Bob had to be put down while still serving.

While Chatman had returned to uniformed patrol, only working occasionally with Mounted Patrol, he was able to adopt King, his second horse after Bob, from the division.

Looking back at his 14 years with Mounted Patrol, he said he valued the unique relationship the job let him build with his horses.

Chatman, who raises dogs and has worked with animals most of his life, said: "It was one of the hardest things ... I spent more time with her than I did at home."

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