San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter serves as the city’s hub for tourists and residents to see concerts, dine at popular restaurants and drink at dozens of bars. More and more often, though, the sights and smells wafting on Gaslamp Quarter streets are not filled with aromas from French bistros, but with the noxious, pungent and tear-inducing odors of oleoresin capsicum, more often referred to as pepper spray, discharged by San Diego Police Officers patrolling the nightlife district.
In 2025, SDPD’s Gaslamp enforcement team, also known as the Gaslamp bike team, deployed more pepper spray strikes than in the previous two years combined, according to SDPD use-of-force data obtained by Times of San Diego.
SDPD officers last year used pepper spray 361 times while responding to calls in the Gaslamp, more than double the number of deployments in 2024, and three times the number in 2023…