In December 2020, after a flurry of amendments and hours of heated debate over the police department’s budget, the Minneapolis City Council voted 11-2 to cut funding for the mounted patrol unit.

The amount was small — just $230,000 of the police department’s roughly $165 million budget — and it passed without much discussion as part of a larger effort to shift $7.7 million from the police department to other city departments like the Office of Violence Prevention.

After a failed attempt to put dismantling and replacing the police department on the 2020 ballot, the budget debate represented the first chance the City Council had since the murder of George Floyd to enact changes to a department that it otherwise has no authority over.

The move didn’t eliminate any staff positions, it just zeroed out funding for contractual services associated with boarding and caring for the city’s dozen or so horses. But the police department didn’t get rid of its horses.