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Mounted police
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Mounted police are police who patrol on horseback. They continue to serve in remote areas and in metropolitan areas where their day-to-day function may be picturesque or ceremonial, but they are also employed in crowd control because of their mobile mass and height advantage and increasingly in the UK for crime prevention and high visibility policing roles.
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Encyclopedia
Mounted police are police who patrol on horseback. They continue to serve in remote areas and in metropolitan areas where their day-to-day function may be picturesque or ceremonial, but they are also employed in crowd control because of their mobile mass and height advantage and increasingly in the UK for crime prevention and high visibility policing roles. Mounted police may be employed for specialized duties ranging from patrol of parks and wilderness areas, where police cars would be impractical or noisy, to riot duty, where the horse serves to intimidate those whom it is desired to disperse through its larger size, or may be sent in to snatch trouble makers or offenders from the crowd. For example, in the UK mounted police are most often seen at football matches, although they are also a common sight on the streets of many towns and cities as a visible police presence and crime deterrent during the day and night.
A well-known mounted police force is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The RCMP now uses standard police methods and does not use any horses operationally. However, horses are used in the Musical Ride as well as by several provincial and municipal police detachments. In the United States, mounted patrols are still essential to local law enforcement operations. The largest Midwestern mounted patrol is in the Minneapolis Police Department of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The U.S. Border Patrol had 205 horses as of 2005. Most of these are employed along the U.S.-Mexico border. In Arizona, these animals are fed special processed feed pellets so that their wastes do not spread non-native plants in the national parks and wildlife areas they patrol.
Equipment
Tack used by mounted police is largely similar to standard riding tack, with adaptations for police use. Synthetic saddles are often favored over those made of natural leather to reduce weight, important both because of long riding hours and because police officers must carry numerous articles of personal equipment. High-traction horseshoes made of specialty metals or fitted with rubber soles are typically used in place of standard steel horseshoes, which are prone to slip on pavement. Rubber soled shoes also produce less noise than steel shoes and jar the hoof less. Horses working in riot control wear facial armor.
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