Vile Memories Revived

Those of us who were not in Mountain View Park on the afternoon of Nov. 4 to witness the spectacle of two white police officers on horseback leading a handcuffed, black prisoner down the street on a rope can only try to conjure up the image of what it must have been like. To help, we consult our memories of similar scenes: Selma in the ‘60s, Cape Town in the ‘80s or, worse, Virginia in the 1800s.

The official police version of the incident differs from what witnesses told reporters only on such points as how far the man was forced to walk while tethered to the horse. It would appear to have been at least four blocks. What’s astonishing about this incident--beyond the fact that two officers would think this was the appropriate way to treat any person--is that the police are still not sensitive to the bitter feelings many residents of Southeast San Diego hold about the ways police officers conduct themselves in that neighborhood.

It comes as no surprise that those who witnessed the episode were outraged. Part of their anger was an instinctive reaction to what they were seeing; another part was caused by the fact that children from a nearby elementary school also saw what happened.

It’s not impossible to envision circumstances when a situation is so dangerous or the need to get a suspect into a secured area so urgent that pulling him behind a horse might be necessary. That was hardly the case with a man accused of a leash violation and of giving the police a false name. According to a police spokesman, the officers did not wait longer for a police car to arrive to take their prisoner because “it was the end of their shift or whatever.”

The spokesman said the reason one officer did not walk with the man while the other led his horse is that they are trained not to leave their mounts. But on the day the story appeared in The Times, the Police Department changed its policy, saying that in the future mounted officers would only tether a person to hold him for a patrol car and would not make a person walk on a leash farther than to the closest street.

The same day the Mountain View Park incident was reported, another story told about how the Police Department intends to revamp its human relations training program. Nothing could have underscored the need any more forcefully.