Some nights, work means galloping across a soccer field chasing a car burglar. Some nights, it’s clomping across a dance floor at a downtown club. Some nights, it’s simply trying not to get spooked by a bus.
These are normal shifts for Rusty and Zeus, two of the four-legged officers who don uniforms and badges before hitting the town at dusk.
Gainesville Police officers Tracy Fundenburg and Tom Lardner spend three evenings per week patrolling crowds downtown and guiding their mounts through situations other horses would balk at.
Each horse-and-rider team equals about 10 officers on the ground, but as the force looks to get more officers on the ground without spending more, Fundenburg said it has eyed the mounted unit as a candidate for budget cuts more than once. This year was the closest the unit came to being slashed, she said.
Because much of their work is preventative — providing a presence — Fundenburg said it’s hard to show results to prove the mounted unit is still worth keeping intact.
“That’s the problem with our unit,” she said. “We’ll never know how many crimes we’ve prevented.”
Like the GPD aviation and K-9 units, it’s partially paid for through money from drug arrests. But the officers’ salaries, vehicles and gas come out of GPD’s general budget.
“Each time we get wind of being cut, we’re like ‘Oh my gosh, don’t they realize how we’re effective here,’” she said.
Fundenburg and Lardner will say the horses provide visibility, effective crowd control and a positive way to relate to residents.
There’s also a bond between horse and rider.
The relationship is evident when Fundenburg grabs a packet of strawberry-frosted Pop-Tarts from a box that sits on a tack room shelf.
She crinkles the foil wrapper as she walks up behind her mount, a Belgian-Appaloosa mix named Rusty. His features become animated. His ears lean forward and swivel. He arches his neck and swings his head around to lip the pastry — broken in half — from her hand.
The treat is the precursor to the routine of patrol nights.
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Fundenburg clips a purple rope onto Rusty’s halter, but he shows no signs of budging. She clicks and croons, trying to coax him out of the stall. The sagging rope between them insinuates it’s time to move, but she’s not rushing him. With horses, it’s all about trust. It’s coaxing, not forcing.
He complies, and she leads him behind the stable to a concrete wash pad. Lardner does the same for Zeus. “The boys” — that’s how Fundenburg refers to the horses — squabble and try to nip at each other when they pass through the narrow stable corridor.
Fundenburg and Lardner patrol downtown Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, primarily to monitor bar closings and panhandling. On Fridays, the night usually starts by trailering the horses to Citizens Field on Waldo Road, where they’ll keep watch at the entrance to the high school football game for a couple of hours. It’s about visibility, to head off thefts in the parking lot, and it works. One night after a game, they caught a car burglar by chasing him across the field.
Spectators, mostly parents and children, make comments as they drift by.
“Why are there horses here?”
“I want a pony.”
“Don’t yell at the horse, honey.”
A 1-year-old girl holding her mother’s hand pointed at the pair of horses and babbled.
“That’s not a doggie,” her mom said, chuckling.
The mother, Danielle Jeannite, said the horses are approachable but also commanding.
“It demands a certain authority,” she said.
It’s that authority that Lardner said is so useful downtown at last call, when crowds spill out off of sidewalks and onto the road.
The horses sweep crowds back onto the sidewalks. They also provide another set of senses for observing and responding to potential threats. Lardner and Fundenburg watch the horses’ body language, particularly their swiveling ears, for clues.
Unlike cops on foot, Lardner and Fundenburg can see over the crowd, which usually parts for them because people don’t want to get stepped on. To prevent fights, they listen for loud voices and watch for guys taking their shirts off. If they sense unrest in an area, they ride over, usually calming the tensions.
“It’s a rare occasion for the fight to not be over by the time we get there,” Lardner said.
But with higher visibility comes greater scrutiny and an increased potential for violence.
In crowded, late-night situations, sometimes people slap the horses intentionally. It’s an arrestable offense.
Fundenburg and Lardner prep the horses for these scenarios at the stables to get them used to crowd interaction.
They train with dollar store items, pelting the horses with foam pool noodles, squirting them with silly string, startling them with umbrellas. In the controlled environment, they can give the horses a sense of winning each time.
“Anything that they’re going to encounter downtown and in the public, we try to introduce here in a safe environment where they’re going to win and be like, ‘Oh, that’s no big deal,’” Fundenburg said.
They also train while they’re downtown. One night, Lardner rode Zeus across the dance floor at :08 Country Western Club before it opened. Because horses think anything black is a hole, the black floor must have looked like an abyss, Lardner said. Walking Zeus across was an exercise in trust.
Tonight, they may go stand by the end zone at the football game and wait for the band to march by.
After the game, Fundenburg and Lardner will head to get dinner. They frequent a Subway on 13th Street because it has a big parking lot for the trailer. It’s hard to find a meal that’s not greasy fast food after 10 p.m., Lardner says.
Later, maybe they’ll trot to the Rosa Parks bus station to let the horses experience the woosh and gasping of the RTS buses passing. Zeus’ head got clipped once by a bus mirror, so he needs particular training to keep fears at bay.
But that’s all for later, for the early hours of the morning, the hours that smell like alcohol and sweat.
Right now, it’s cheering crowds, concession stands selling hotdogs and bands playing brassy songs. It’s chatting with parents who drift by.
How’re you doing, officer? How’s your horse?
“I’m loving life,” Fundenburg said. “Happy to be on ‘em.”
A version of this story ran on page 4 on 11/8/2013 under the headline "Police horses stable as they patrol downtown Gainesville"
Officer Tracy Fundenburg suits up Blue, one of the four GPD patrol horses, at a stable on Thursday. All the horses have been privately donated and receive special training.
