First responders astride horses and bikes will patrol college football championship crowds
By Tony Marrera, Tampa Bay Times, December 29, 2016
TAMPA — Horse hooves and knobby police bike tires will be out in force when Tampa becomes the center of the college football universe next week.
Tens of thousands of football fans are expected to descend on Raymond James Stadium and the downtown core for the College Football Playoff Championship game on Jan. 9. When they do, a couple of dozen police officers and paramedics will navigate the crowds on horses and mountain bikes in ways that cruisers and ambulances can't.
That's no surprise. The Tampa Police Department has had bike and horse cops for several years working events like the Gasparilla parade and the Republican National Convention. Officials say the two-wheeled, four-hoofed approach allows officers and paramedics to patrol and get to patients quickly in large gatherings.
But the College Football Playoff Championship game, which follows a weekend full of related concerts and other events downtown, will be one of the biggest events yet for the mounted patrols. And it will be the first event of its size in which police bike officers will work alongside Tampa Fire Rescue's new bike paramedics.
"I would say the game itself will rival the Super Bowl, but with all the events leading up to it, I don't think we've seen anything like it," police Sgt. Colin McCoy, head of the department's Bicycle Operations and Response unit, said during a media availability Thursday in Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park.
The department's bicycle presence ramped up in 2012 when it landed federal money to expand its bike fleet for the Republican Convention. The agency created a separate bicycle operations unit last year with a fleet of 17 bicycles.
"In 2012 with the RNC, we saw how effective the bikes really were in crowded conditions," McCoy said.
Numbers from previous college football championships show that Tampa can expect 45,000 to 50,000 fans at events like the game-day tailgate. Some 72,000 fans are expected to pack Raymond James Stadium, and about 6,000 seats will be added near the end zones to boost capacity to about 72,000.
A series of free concerts from Jan. 6-8 featuring Eric Paslay, Flo Rida and Usher, along with other events, will draw thousands to Curtis Hixon Park. Several events are also planned in and around the Tampa Convention Center.
McCoy declined to say how many bike officers will be working at any given time.
"You'll see more out here, but really we're doing the same thing we've always done, and in these big-scale events you'll see more EMS riders out here with us," he said.
This year's Gasparilla parades were the first test for Tampa Fire Rescue's First Assessment Stabilization Team, or FAST. The team has eight mountain bikes outfitted with medical bags containing basic and advanced life-support equipment and trained 16 paramedics for the team. They rolled out last January.
During the Pirates parade, FAST members were the first to arrive to help a patient who fell and needed to be prepared for transport as a trauma alert, said Captain Ryan Bradford, the team's leader.
"We absolutely know that had a positive effect on the outcome for that patient," Bradford said.
For the downtown events on the weekend before the game, Bradford will have six FAST bikes on patrol. Three medics will be assigned to a joint operation unit with bike officers working Curtis Hixon Park, the Riverwalk and the Convention Center.
"It's a little different than our Gasparilla events ... in that it's a much larger concentration (of people) in a much smaller footprint," Bradford said.
Police horses like Chad the Thoroughbred will be making rounds through the weekend and during the tailgate party to help tamp down unruly revelers, said police Corporal Ellen Schantz, leader of the mounted patrol unit. The agency will get help from mounted units from the Pinellas Park and St. Petersburg police departments, among other agencies.
We're there for crowd control," Schantz said. "We can see higher than officers on the ground or on bikes and if we see issues or problems we can go right in where we need to be."
And of course, there's public relations. During Thursday's event, children flocked to Chad and his partner Red, a 22-year-old appendix horse with a rust-colored coat. As the kids stroked the horse's muscular necks, one of the bike cops jokingly lamented that their own trusty steeds never attract that kind of attention.
Tampa Fire Rescue rolled out its new First Assessment Stabilization Team, or FAST, for the Gasparilla parades earlier this year, outfitting eight mountain bikes with medical bags containing basic and advanced life-support equipment.
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