At Mountain Lake Park this week, a dog owner let his unleashed pet splash around in the lake — well over ten feet from shore — scaring off birds and ignoring signs that explicitly prohibit swimming and require dogs to be leashed. When a fellow park-goer pointed this out, the owner got in their face, demanded they not "disrespect" him, and asked, "Do you wanna get hit?"

His defense? Since the person asking him to leash his dog wasn't a police officer or park ranger, he had "no right to say anything."

Let's unpack that logic for a second. In a city where police staffing is perpetually thin and park rangers are about as common as affordable studio apartments, we're told that only uniformed authorities can remind people that rules exist. And those authorities, of course, are nowhere to be found. It's a neat little accountability vacuum: the city won't enforce its own rules, and residents who try to fill the gap get intimidated into silence.

Credit to the older bystander who stepped in to de-escalate. That man did more community policing in thirty seconds than the city managed all day.

The confronted resident plans to file a non-emergency report with SFPD — "for stats," as they put it, which tells you everything about how much faith San Franciscans have in follow-through. The report won't lead to enforcement. It'll be a line item in a database nobody reads. But at least the numbers will reflect what anyone who visits the city's parks already knows: the rules are decorative.

Mountain Lake Park is a gem — one of the few natural lakes left in the city, home to a painstaking ecological restoration effort. Letting dogs run wild through it isn't freedom. It's freeloading off a shared resource while everyone else foots the bill for its upkeep.

If San Francisco wants its parks to be more than open-air conflict zones, it needs to actually staff them. Until then, the signs might as well say: Rules apply only if you feel like it.