Abilene Police Department's mounted unit rides into town to encourage engagement

While some Abilene Police officers go to the dogs — referring to the department's canine officers — a quartet recently has found their true trail.

On horses, of course.

Patrol officer Jessica Watkins, who has been with the APD for just over nine years, said there was a small, somewhat unofficial mounted patrol "sort of dissolving" when she first got on with the department.

A lifelong horse enthusiast and former rodeoer, she believe that a permanent addition would be a "value-added" prospect for the APD, especially when it comes to community engagement.

And there could be law enforcement functions baked in, including the potential to help locate missing persons and with downtown patrol.

So she pitched the idea to Chief Marcus Dudley, who has "supported it wholeheartedly," Watkins said.

The current group, made up of Watkins and fellow officers Larry Hill, Kenneth Welch and Sean Yargas, has since October been seen at events throughout the community, including the recent downtown Christmas parade.

Some of the officers will be featured at an upcoming Blue Santa event Saturday at the northside Walmart in Abilene.

The horses — the real stars of the show — are Gambit, an Appaloosa ridden by Welch; "CB," a Quarter Horse ridden by Yargus; Wyatt, named after Wyatt Earp, a Shire who is Watkins' ride; and Argo, a Percheron ridden by Hill.

Dudley said the city is "fortunate to have such talented officers and the resources they provide to be able to have brought back our Mounted Patrol Unit."

"The unit is the epitome of our West Texas culture and a connection with our community," he said.

Dudley said the unit offers ability to assist with patrol duties and to "serve as an excellent resource for community engagement."

"We look forward to one day having this become a full-time resource for Abilene," he said.

More: Only horses had long faces at Abilene police's trunk-or-treat with new mounted unit

Some training required

Before their public debuts, some training was required for horses and riders.

"We went to the mounted patrol training school that was put on by the Arlington Mounted Patrol Unit in Cleburne," Watkins said.

Horses in the state of Texas aren't certified in the same way a dog would be, she said.

"But they've been through the gamut of stuff and exposed to things so that we know how they will respond and react," she said.

Horsemanship training involves learning to make sure riders can properly maneuver their animals, she said.

That's so "if we get into a tight situation, we can get them out of it," she said.

For the horses themselves, there's some necessary desensitization sensory training.

"So, we did a lot of smoke and flares and just random stuff," Watkins said, including training using pool noodles.

"They had bunch of pool noodles hanging around, plastic bags floating around," she said.

Also included was crowd-control training, such as how to move horses through a throng of people and how to use them to move cars.

That could be essential if an emergency vehicle needs to get somewhere and a crowd is blocking a roadway, Watkins said.

"We learned how to split the crowd to get those cars out without harming anybody," she said.

The horses also worked through "a bunch of obstacle courses," she said.

"We eventually deployed a taser off the horses and shot firearms off of them," Watkins said.

All of that is necessary, she said, both for horse and rider, giving the officers confidence in their animals and their steeds the confidence they need to face various scenarios.

Lifelong love

Watkins has been riding since she was about 4, starting out learning with her uncle in North Carolina.

"We lived in town, so we didn't have any (horses) of our own," she said.

But when she really "picked up what I call the bug for horses," her dad let her go to a stable close to their home.

"I had an agreement, when I was about 10 or 11 years old, that I would go to the stable and clean stalls for them," she said. "In exchange, I would get to ride for about 10 or 15 minutes. I did that for quite some time. So, I've been riding actively since I was about 10."

The family got its own horses about a year later, moving out to the country and getting some land of their own.

"And then I went off to college and (participated in) college rodeos," she said, doing barrel racing, followed by more of the same at the professional level.

Eventually, "I got this job and kind of put the horses to the side for a while," she said.

"I still owned them but didn't ride them nearly as much," Watkins said.

She bought a draft horse and a carriage and had plans to start up a carriage company, but admits she "didn't really do all the research into that I wanted to do beforehand."

"Now I had a draft horse, and so I thought, well, what better time to pitch something to the chief than when you've got a big old horse like that?" she said.

An officer and an equine

While details are still being worked out, there will be a law enforcement component, Watkins said.

"We will eventually be doing some patrolling downtown, and then the parks and that kind of stuff — looking out for people doing things they shouldn't be doing, contacting people that might be intoxicated, or something of that nature," she said.

Missing person cases might be another potential use, especially since horses can more easily traverse certain types of terrain and areas more easily than someone in a car or on a bike.

"Hopefully, we don't ever have to deal with that," she said. "But in case we do, we'd also have a height advantage. We could see further than somebody on foot can see, or into things differently."

So far, the response to the officers and the equines, especially, has been positive.

"People want to come up and pet them, and we love that," Watkins said. "We want to interact with folks, and it's a really good way to be able to do that, especially for people that don't necessarily like police officers."

Abilene is generally a pro-police community, she said, which isn't universal.

"Our community seems to love the police and support us," she said.

But there are still some that may not necessarily want to have an interaction with a police officer, she said.

As it turns out, horses can be great icebreakers.

"This gives them a chance to have a positive (interaction), and it's great for us because we can have a positive influence on folks," she said.

Brian Bethel covers city and county government and general news for the Abilene Reporter-News. If you appreciate locally driven news, you can support local journalists with a digital subscription to ReporterNews.com.

This article originally appeared on Abilene Reporter-News: Abilene police's mounted unit rides into town, encouraging engagement