Your ad, on a police horse

In business and desperate to tap into the lucrative football hooligan market? Need to sharpen your brand recognition among riotous drunks in the marketplace on a Saturday night? Nottinghamshire police are here to help. Businesses are being given a unique opportunity to advertise on their seven police horses. Saddlecloths and horseboxes will be adorned with logos and sponsors' names under the scheme, which, officers insist, is not a sign that their mounted division is cash-strapped or about to be scrapped.

Police on horseback are going through a lean time. At least three forces, including West Midlands and Staffordshire, have scrapped their mounted units in recent years, usually on grounds of rising costs. There is also a perception that, just as car chases superseded hot pursuit on horseback, so an officer on a horse must now dismount in the face of technological progress (Tasers, guns, Robocop).

Not so, says Sergeant Lesley Taylor, the officer in charge of Nottinghamshire's seven steeds. Everyone realises that all the police surveillance vans in the world will not calm an unruly crowd quite like a neighing, frothing, stamping, rearing and exceedingly well-groomed police horse. Horses remain crucial at football matches. But the role of the mounted units has also been expanded to play a key role in high-profile policing.

"If a car is on patrol, it could go up and down a street five times in a shift and no one would see it. If a horse goes up a street, people see or hear it instantly and know the police are on patrol," explains Taylor. "The public take a lot of reassurance from that."

According to a spokeswoman, West Midlands police scrapped their mounted unit in 1999 because it was taking resources away from the bobbies on the beat the public wanted. But Nottinghamshire police say that their mounted police do more patrols than regular officers. Called from job to job, ordinary police have little time for beat policing, according to Taylor, whereas Notts' seven horses are on patrol for at least four hours every working day.

Horseback also provides an excellent vantage point, with riders able to see over walls and into gardens, which makes them useful in searching for missing people or hunting criminals on the run.

Ultimately, Taylor finds that horses break the ice between uniformed police and a wary populace. "If we are patrolling an urban area and we stop at a traffic light, people will run up and say hello. If a police officer just stood there, people wouldn't walk up and talk to them. The horse draws them in."

Nottinghamshire Police Authority insists that its sponsorship scheme (cost of advertising on a horse? Negotiable) is simply to encourage businesses to get involved in the community. Besides, the mounted unit makes money anyway: it is hired out to all the unfortunate forces who put their horses out to grass.

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