MIAMI BEACH, FLA. (WSVN) - Miami Beach officials are floating a proposal to add a horseback patrol unit to the city’s police department.
The mayor of Miami Beach, Steven Meiner, is at the head of this proposal focused on deterring crime, alongside the city’s police chief.
“It’s gonna be heard in finance, let’s get it to commission,” Meiner said in an October commission meeting.
But at least one commissioner is pushing back against the idea.
“We can’t be supporting vanity projects for the police and the mayor on mounted police patrols in Miami Beach,” said Commissioner David Suarez. “It certainly seems like a vanity project.”
While Suarez criticized the proposal in a recent newsletter, Meiner and Police Chief Wayne Jones say they want cops mounted to help patrol large crowds by 2028, assuming they can secure the funds needed.
The mayor argues the project “actually is saving money.”
Meiner shared that it is yet to be determined whether funds for the project would come out of the city or police department budget, but he said the expected initial cost of $500,000 would come from donations.
“What if I told you, for the first year operating cost, it would cost the City of Miami Beach, and the people of Miami Beach, absolutely zero,” Jones said.
But even as a donor-funded project, Suarez finds this project isn’t what the people need right now.
“We just passed Amendment 3,” he said. “We need tax cuts. We can’t be affording these vanity projects.”
Cost is not the only worry Suarez has.
“Can you imagine the cleanliness issue that we’re gonna have?” he said. “Horse crap everywhere? And it’s really hot in Miami Beach. The humidity’s extremely high, it seems like it’s gonna be animal abuse for these horses.”
Meiner brushed off those concerns, saying “there’s no animal cruelty here.”
“Most prestigious law enforcement agencies use mounted police patrol, and this is just another tool that we can use for crowd control, community engagement,” said Meiner. “Picture large crowds. You have thousands of people on Ocean Drive, for example. Now you have an officer 10 feet high in the air”
The City of Miami Police, the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, Coral Gables and other agencies already use horseback units.
It wouldn’t be the first time Miami Beach had horseback units. The city’s police previously used horses nearly a century ago during the 1930s before bailing on the program because of World War II. They also had horseback units through much of the ’80s and early ’90s.
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