San Diego Police Change Policy on Roping Suspects to Horses

San Diego police officials Thursday changed their arrest procedures in response to complaints from the black community about two mounted officers handcuffing a black suspect and leading him through a Southeast San Diego neighborhood by a rope attached to the saddle of one of the horses.

Bill Joe Hicks, 44, was arrested on Nov. 4 on suspicion of walking his dog without a leash and giving police a false name, both misdemeanors. Two white officers tethered his handcuffs to a saddle and, according to witnesses, walked him about five blocks through Mountain View Park and down several residential and commercial streets in the predominantly black neighborhood.

The incident angered nearby residents and onlookers, who described the police handling of Hicks as inhumane.

Neal Petties, an area manager for the city Park and Recreation Department, said Hicks was “stumbling and nearly falling” as he tried to keep up with two patrolmen on horses.

“It was ugly,” said Petties, who viewed the incident from a park and complained a day later to police. “I have never seen anything like that before. . . . I just relate it to my forefathers and what I’ve seen on TV and read about. It reminded me of a person getting off a slave ship and going to a slave market. I was very upset.”

Mounted patrol officers in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said their arrest procedures do not allow for tying a suspect to a saddle and walking him through city streets.

After the incident, members of the black community in San Diego complained last month to the Police Department and a police spokesman announced Thursday that it would change its arrest procedures.

Although mounted officers will still be allowed to tether handcuffed suspects to their saddles, they can do so only with people who are resisting arrest or to lead someone from a remote area to the first city street, said Cmdr. Keith Enerson, department spokesman.

Otherwise, mounted officers must simply wait with the suspect until a patrol car arrives to provide transportation, Enerson said.

Enerson acknowledged that the incident last month made it look like police were parading Hicks around the neighborhood.

“We won’t do that anymore,” he said.

According to Enerson, Hicks was walking his dog without a leash in Mountain View Park when the animal began to chase children. After the dog evidently bit a child, Enerson said, two animal control officers arrived at the park, followed shortly by two mounted patrol officers.

The man would have been given a citation for violating a city ordinance that prohibits walking a dog in a city park without a leash, he said. But Hicks provided false information to the officers, who decided to arrest him.

Enerson said the officers waited at least 20 minutes for a patrol car, but then decided to tether Hicks to a saddle and walk him through the neighborhood.

Hicks was not violent and did not resist police, Enerson said.

J. D. Reynolds, a retired city sanitation truck driver who viewed the incident from his porch, said it bothered him that two county animal control vehicles were dispatched to pick up the dog, but police could not send a car to transport the man.

The arrest was discussed a couple of weeks later when Petties and other black leaders were invited to a community relations meeting at the Southeastern police substation.