Metropolitan Police Mounted Branch
The Metropolitan Police Mounted Branch is the mounted police branch of London's Metropolitan Police. It is part of Met Operations. History. The London Bow Street Horse Patrol was formed in 1758. Mounted police patrols increased in the late 1830s. Percy Laurie, a retired British Army officer, established the mounted police unit of the modern Metropolitan Police in 1918. Operations. Figures released by the Met under a Freedom of Information Act request showed that the annual number of police horses in the MPS Mounted Branch Unit in calendar years 2009 to 2018 ranged from a low  of 100 to a high of 116. As of 2016, the annual average cost incurred by the police force was £5,558 per horse, not including stabling, and there were 142 police officers qualified to ride. The total budget for the mounted unit was £9,969,736 in 2018. The police horses used are typically either half thoroughbred and half draft breed, or three-quarters thoroughbred and one-quarter draft breed. The police horses are used for patrols of London's main parks; for ceremonial events; and for crowd control at events such as football matches. A 2014 RAND Europe/University  of Oxford Centre for Criminology study found: "While mounted police in the UK are traditionally thought of as public-order policing resources, deployment data show that they spend between 60-70 per cent of their time in local area patrols, and 10-20 per cent of their time in public order work, with the remainder spent in activities such as ceremonial deployments." A typical daily patrol is 9–10 miles, but a police horse escort of the King's Troop, Royal Horse Artillery from its St John's Wood barracks to central London is 16 miles. The Branch has eight stables : Hyde Park, Lewisham Police Station, Great Scotland Yard, Hammersmith, West Hampstead, Bow Road, Kings Cross, and Imber Court in East Molesey, Surrey. The horses are trained at the latter site. The City of London Police, which is separate from the Met Police, also maintains a mounted unit.