Using Horse Sense : Sheriff’s Mounted Posse Factors in Fun While Patrolling Santa Clarita Valley

There’s a lot of horsing around when Bob Warford, Chuck Powell and Bob Harris get together for monthly gatherings with friends in the Santa Clarita Valley.

It’s not that the meetings don’t involve serious work. But fun is a big factor when the group rides horseback, patrolling streets in east Newhall, keeping motorcyclists off private ranches or ensuring that big community events don’t get out of hand.

They are among the 38 members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Mounted Posse in the Santa Clarita Valley--one of 14 sheriff’s posses in the county. Riding their own horses, members of the posse combine a love for horses with law enforcement. And they do it for free, said Warford, the group’s coordinator for the last 11 years.

“We’re just a bunch of cowboys at heart,” said Powell, who is a Los Angeles County firefighter at the Sand Canyon station. “It’s nice to get away from the rat race, to go out on the horse and take it easy.”

They go on training rides at least once a month and are called out for special assignments an average of five or six times a year, Warford said. More than anything else, the posse provides a highly visible law-enforcement presence when large groups of people gather at parks and on streets for special events, he said.

Half of the posse’s riders are Los Angeles police officers who own horses and live in the area, Warford said. For them, volunteering for the posse is a refreshing break from filling out crime reports, checking for gang activity or making drug busts. It’s also an alternative to joining the Los Angeles Police Department’s own Mounted Unit, which recently stopped accepting part-time and volunteer riders to become a full-time, professional detail.

Though they sometimes get grim assignments, such as looking for the remains of lost hikers or searching for missing children, members say that most of the time they are living it up while putting down crime from the saddle.

“I enjoy doing this. My other job is work,” said Harris, a detective in the Police Department’s robbery and homicide division at Parker Center in downtown Los Angeles. “It pretty much started out as a hobby with everybody. We just all enjoy it.”

Los Angeles Police Officer Jean Posner, a horse lover since she was 3, said she thought about joining her department’s Mounted Unit but was concerned that she might not qualify because of on-the-job injuries she suffered several years ago. So she joined the sheriff’s posse, which she said is not only easier on her but also is better for her horse.

“Sometimes in riots in L.A., my friends have had horses slashed by razor blades or hit in the head with bottles,” said Posner, who patrols low-income housing projects in the Police Department’s northeast valley Foothill Division. In the Santa Clarita Valley, she said, “the heavy-duty stuff is only in Newhall, off Market Street and San Fernando Road, with people drinking in public.”

Of those posse members who aren’t Los Angeles police officers, most are Level 2 sheriff’s reservists, meaning they have had 13 weeks of Police Academy training and are permitted to carry a service revolver on patrol, as long as they are under the direct supervision of a full-time deputy, Warford said. All posse members must complete a 40-hour horseback training course before joining the unit.

Among the posse’s assignments last year was the search in March for 7-year-old Sara Nan Hodges, a Newhall girl whose body was later found in the bedroom of a 14-year-old neighbor, who has pleaded guilty to her murder. They also helped authorities try to determine the location from which three horses escaped and ran onto the Golden State Freeway in April, killing a 19-year-old motorist and injuring another man when they collided with cars.

Reservist Rita Vanatter, a school nurse for the Westside Union School District in the Antelope Valley, said the most gratifying part of being on the posse is the attention the horses get from children.

“They just want to touch your horse,” she said. “It’s like the highlight of their lives.”

Indeed, many posse members say, enforcing the law from the back of a horse is kinder and gentler than doing it from a black-and-white patrol car or a motorcycle.

When two park rangers were surrounded by a group of angry, intoxicated men last year at the Castaic Lake State Recreation Area, the presence of mounted deputies had an instant calming effect when the men saw their children’s fascination with the horses, a posse member said.

“The kids see the horses, and the parents see the kids are happy,” he said. “It calms everybody down.”

As far as major crime goes, posse members don’t see much of that, and neither do they really want to, Warford said.

“We really haven’t had exciting shoot-’em-up type things,” he said. “It seems routine, but it’s a chance to get out into the open and ride our horses.”