Home of the 10-foot Police

So this caught my eye the other day:

Morgan Underhill, I learned, is one of the hands who tend the police horses stabled in Golden Gate Park. She was walking John the horse and Cabela her dog and invited me to come by and visit anytime. When I did, the sergeant in charge of the unit,  Teresa SanGiacomo, was incredibly welcoming and showed me around.

San Francisco's mounted unit was founded in 1864, making it the second oldest in the country, after New York City's. It's housed in the FC Egan Stables, at the west end of the polo fiends, built in 1935 as a WPA project and named for a long-time trainer of SF police horses, Fred C. Egan.

The stables is filled with the usual horse paraphernalia, as well as dozens of photos mounted officers and their steeds. Because of renovations underway, the pictures are currently in a pile in one of the tack rooms, but I sifted through them, and here are a few:

The photos are mostly from the Jesse Brown Cook collection at the Bancroft Library. Cook was a member of the San Francisco police department from the 1890s to the 1930s and left a remarkable collection of scrapbooks containing thousands of photos, news clippings and other ephemera documenting the department.

The unit today is much reduced from the time when every police substation had horses and the park was patrolled by mounted officers who had to contend with such issues as runaway bison and speeding cyclists violating the 10 mph speed limits. "When one of them caught a cyclist in violation of the rules, he galloped after the bicycle and lassoed the rider," according to Raymond Clary’s history “The Making of Golden Gate Parks”.  

The stable was built to accommodate 40 horses. But by 1948, the police department began reducing the numbers of mounted officers and consolidating units because, according to Clary, “a shortage of horsemen in the department.”

There are just six police horses now since the recent retirement of Nate. "We try to retire them when they're young enough to just go be a horse and live in a pasture and have a very good quality of quality of life," said SanGiacomo. The unit only has three officers now, also due to retirements.

The horses who remain are Bubba, Sunny, Gus, John, Duke and Rusty. Just like human officers, the horses go through swearing-ceremonies and are honored when they retire. According to the police department, the horses have to be “extremely well broke and gentle, along with being of sound mind and in top physical condition.” Few make the cut. In fact, it took a year-long search to find the last two recruits, Gus and Duke.

Not required is an artistic bent, but that hasn’t stopped Rusty. A trainer from the San Francisco zoo, who is also the brother of one of the stable hands, slowly and patiently taught the horse to hold a paintbrush in his teeth and move it across a canvas. "He loves it," said SanGiacomo.

She showed me several of his paintings. While he seems to favor blues and purples (horses apparently see blues the best), stable hand Katie Corrigan said he does his most expressive strokes when painting with red.

An artist and his work

A mounted unit may seem a throwback, but SanGiacomo says it's the most effective way of being an officer she has experienced in her career. "You're ten feet tall, she said. You can see everything."

SanGiacomo and Bubba. Though there’s a year-long waitlist to become a mounted officer, the department is so short-handed that there are currently only three officers in the unit.

She spent years in the Tenderloin as well the Mission and the Richmond before joining the mounted unit in 2019. "The engagement that you get with the community when you are on a horse is unlike anything I have ever experienced. And it is not just children, it’s adults,'' she said. “People that will not engage with cops in a car will have no problem walking up to you. And they say, 'can I pet your horse?' So the benefit for the police work side of it is fantastic.’’