Whether on two feet, two wheels or four legs, Pacific Beach remains a great place to get a ticket.

Public records obtained by Data Watch show the bar-friendly neighborhood — long a favorite among tourists and partygoers, and already a leader in tickets issued to bicyclists and jaywalkers — accounted for more off-leash dog citations than any other in San Diego since 2012.

City rules require leashes on any “animal, fowl, or bird of any kind” in city-owned spaces outside of city-designated off-leash dog parks and training areas. Tickets written for alleged violations of those provisions start at $50, with various assessments could bring the total to as high as $400.

Police officers wrote 678 such citations over the past five years citywide, more than of third of which were issued in Pacific Beach.


That tally does not include 864 similar tickets written by San Diego County’s Department of Animal Services. Records turned over by the department, which handles animal-related code enforcement for the city, show its officers doled out more tickets in Pacific Beach’s ZIP code than anywhere else since 2012. The department did not immediately provide a more detailed geographic breakdown of those citations.

Nearly one in 10 police-authored tickets was accompanied by a separate write-up for low-level offenses that ranged from drinking in public and littering on the beach to driving without a license and using “seditious language.” Police arrested six people on charges that included an off-leash dog violation. Department spokeswoman Sgt. Lisa McKean said she didn’t have enough information on the arrests to comment further.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost one-third of the city’s off-leash tickets were issued within the sprawling confines of Balboa and Mission Bay parks.

But Pacific Beach accounted for more than both parks combined, racking up 238 tickets from February 2012 through the end of March — or more than half of all off-leash tickets written in San Diego neighborhoods.


It’s unclear why police wrote nearly one citation per week in a neighborhood that makes up only 3 percent of the city’s population. McKean said it would require “conjecture” to answer questions about what’s behind those numbers.

Laurie Joniaux, North County Region Deputy Director for the San Diego Department of Animal Services, said her office writes such tickets only when they receive a complaint, and only if one of their 31 enforcement officers is not already handling a more pressing concern.

“We never go looking for problems,” Joniaux said. “So if (tickets are written) in a particular area, it’s because it’s complaint-driven.”

Citation data puts 79-acre Kate Sessions Park, renowned for its eye-popping views of downtown and the Pacific Ocean, at the heart of Pacific Beach’s off-leash dog problem.


No place in the neighborhood has racked up more tickets for the offense since 2012, though unlike most of the area’s other off-leash dog hotspots, the hilltop park sits about 1.5 miles from the neighborhood’s famed bars and beaches, and a full mile from Mission Bay.

“The local residents like to stand up on their hind legs and get out here with video cameras,” said David Davidson of Clairemont, visiting the park with his Maltese, Brodie. “They think it’s their park and their park alone.”

He and others said the police would go to great lengths to catch off-leash rule violators, describing “sting operations” that featured officers lying in wait behind bushes or sneaking up on offenders in darkened police cruisers.

Davidson was handed an off-leash ticket at the park in December 2014. It came to $280, he said, although it was later whittled down after an appearance in front of a sympathetic traffic court judge.


“She said, on the record, that she didn’t think it was right that we charge as much for an off-leash ticket as we do for a moving violation,” Davidson recalled. “I thanked her, because I agreed 100 percent.

“It’s revenue generation, there’s no question about why they’re doing it.”

Ron Bishop, a park regular with two golden retrievers, seconded that view. The part-time Pacific Beach resident was surprised the neighborhood wasn’t subject to even more tickets in recent years.

“It’s certainly a source of income,” he said of the citations. “Where does the money go for these tickets? How do they use it? Because these tickets are not cheap.”


Nearby Ocean Beach, Mission Beach and La Jolla also landed among San Diego’s top-ticketed neighborhoods for off-leash dog violations.

Those four areas, together with Mission Bay and Balboa parks, made up 90 percent of violations citywide.

Sunday was the most popular day to receive such a ticket, most of which were written between March and November, under the extra sunlight provided by Daylight Savings Time.

Nearly five dozen people received multiple off leash dog-related tickets over the past five years.


A 41-year-old San Diego man was cited on four occasions. A 35-year-old man was ticketed twice in the same week.

Citywide, the typical accused violator of off-leash rules was a white 27-year-old male.

Advertisement