Bring back Pittsburgh’s Mounties, you big dummies who call yourselves “leaders” in Pittsburgh! Your cost-cutting measures are a bunch of horses***.

In addition to approving a 2025 budget that slashes the already undermanned Pittsburgh Police by 50 officers to just 800, Pittsburgh’s council and the mayor also foolishly axed the Mounted Police Patrol Unit. It’s foolish, especially because in a city that’s increasingly (and in my view unwisely) focused on tourism, removing our version of the Mounties makes no sense. Such patrol units are ideal in many ways for large events, and the revenue-sapping NFL Draft will be coming to Pittsburgh in 2026 (to which the city has committed $1 million).

Mounted police are an iconic feature of American culture that goes back hundreds of years. They are effective in both crowd control and community relations, and are a warm, rather old-timey, rustic way for officers and their horses to get to know the public. Many people, especially kids, are in awe of the horses and enamored by them. As a kid, I’d go with my family sometimes for Thanksgiving to Detroit to visit relatives and we’d see the Thanksgiving Parade in Detroit, where they also had mounted officers as we did in Pittsburgh. You had to be sitting atop a traffic light to be higher than them.

They are impressive, and beautiful, these horses, and kids can pet them. These fine beasts set officers on a grand, but amiable pedestal. Mounted police are not only a very smart way to handle crowds if things go haywire, they’re an even smarter deterrent to keep crowds mellow, because they make pedestrians feel rather small, and the height of the officer in-saddle allows for a broad view over a crowd. Mounted police horses are people-pleasers, too, bringing smiles, in an age when police need all of the good publicity they can get.

Mounted cops are used for ceremonial events and search and rescue sometimes, too. Allegheny County’s mounted police unit dates to 1932, and has nine horses for parades, festivals, and education.

Like the police pipe and drum corps around here, with their kilts and crooning bagpipes playing Scotland The Brave in parades, the mounted police here are a tradition that’s part of our local culture, which we should keep. There’s something about them that’s very American, yet they are local and unique. They are our version of the Mounties in a tradition of mounted police dating back 300 years in the U.S.

Pittsburgh Police Mounted Patrol was reinstated in 2017 after having been disbanded for many years. Officers had to rebuild it from scratch. They had no barn, trailers, horses, tack, or even uniforms.

The thought of a worthy program that was built from nothing seven years ago being chopped by city officials, who’ve granted NFL billionaires $1 million in funds and in-kind services, might not be fine with every Pittsburgher. How much was spent to create this mounted force, only to foolishly trash it seven years later? Maybe we should keep those mounts on hold in the stables over by Riverview Park, in case council changes its mind next year in time for the oh-so-holy 2026 NFL Draft that will be hosted in Pittsburgh.

Support our police, please. Not NFL fatcats.

Image: Free to use via Pexels.