The Fight Against Crime: Notes From the Front : Pair Stand Out as Mounted Park Officers

Many police officers lament what they see as their fall from public grace, the shift from the days when children would speak to them respectfully and residents would stop an officer just to chat.

They say it doesn’t often happen that way anymore, that they usually aren’t made to feel welcome.

Judy and Tom Musslyn, however, have a different experience when they’re out on patrol. Children wave. Adults ask about their day. And bad guys rarely cause them any problems.

In a time when a uniform itself doesn’t necessarily mean much, a uniform atop a gleaming, snorting, 1,100-pound horse still means a whole lot. The Musslyns, reserve officers in the Mounted Assistance Unit of the Parks and Recreation Department, say they enjoy every bit of their heightened ability to interact with--and police--the public.

They ride mostly on the weekends in any of the 15 or so county parks in their region. They are certain to stand out, since it is against county code for anyone other than police to have horses in a county park.

On a recent Saturday in El Cariso Regional Park in Sylmar, the Musslyns mounted their horses in the parking lot. Decked out in olive-green uniforms and campaign hats, with black regulation cowboy boots, Tom sat atop a wheat-colored quarter horse named Dusty, and Judy rode coal-colored Cody, a Tennessee walking horse.

Mounted officers are perhaps second only to police in helicopters in terms of their ability to see what’s going on. From their eight-foot high vantage point, the Musslyns spend a good portion of their ride looking around, peering into faraway wooded areas and glaring down on folks doing what they shouldn’t.

And from the moment the two clop-clop into the park, they attract attention.

“Ohhhhh, you look so beautiful, “ crooned Claudia Barajas, 20, complying with the Musslyns’ request to attach her German shepherd, Daisy, to a leash.

“We used to live in a town in Mexico--Concepcion de Buenos Aries, near Guadalajara,” said her 14-year-old brother, Gabriel, taking a break from skateboarding. “And there were all these horses around all the time.”

As the mounted officers bid the group a good weekend and rode on, Judy Musslyn said to her husband: “I bet he wouldn’t have wanted to talk to us if we were in a black-and-white.”

Mounted Assistance officers such as the Musslyns, who are police academy-trained, sworn peace officers, are charged with policing county parks. Although they sometimes encounter shootings or the bodies of murder victims dumped in the parks, more frequently, they stay busy keeping order, citing drunks and dope users, heading off gang members looking for trouble or dealing with lovers whose passion has reached the indecent exposure stage.

“It’s pretty funny to ride up on someone when they’re smoking their dope,” Judy Musslyn said. “Especially when you’re riding on the grass, you can sneak up on them and they’re just shocked.”

The Mounted Assistance Units are also brought in during festivals and other celebrations as both participants and crowd controllers.

Tom Musslyn recalled that a few years ago, a festival in El Cariso got out of hand, with the celebrants converging on a group of officers trapped in the center of the park in a near-riot.

“We brought in the mounted patrols, the police officers grabbed on to the horses--one held on to one of their tails--and we brought them right out,” Tom Musslyn said. “The people just stepped aside.

“I can’t remember having a problem with anyone while on horseback,” he said. “It’s a pretty intimidating thing when you’re on a horse. They know we mean business.”

The Musslyns put in the reserves’ minimum required 10 hours a month on horseback or in a regular patrol car.

But they prefer the horses, which are trained to withstand children’s pokes, crowds, sirens, loud noises, other animals and hostile gatherings.

“Our whole object is to make the parks safer for everyone,” Tom Musslyn said. “People really enjoy having us out here.”