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Grover Beach police report decline in illegal fireworks yet issue 10 citations

July 5, 2026

By JOSH FRIEDMAN

Grover Beach police officers issued 10 citations for illegal fireworks over the July 4 holiday, despite reporting a decline in their usage from prior years.

Prior to this year’s Independence Day celebrations, the city of Grover Beach announced it would be issuing $1,000 fines for one to 10 illegal fireworks; $3,000 fines for 10 to 20 illegal fireworks; and $5,000 fines for more than 20 illegal fireworks. Under a Grover Beach ordinance, property owners, tenants, renters or any person hosting a gathering can be held responsible for illegal fireworks on their property or on the street or sidewalk.

Police also said they would be using drones to locate illegal fireworks and associate them with a residence.

Officers responded to several illegal fireworks calls throughout the night, the Grover Beach Police Department said in a statement Sunday Morning. But, there were no major incidents in Grover Beach, and officers reported a decline in use of illegal fireworks. 

Likewise, Grover Beach residents reported on social media that they saw a decline in usage of illegal fireworks from previous years, the police department said.

 


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2 Comments

It is comforting to know that GB has successfully cut out the “due process” of the unjudicial system. Why waste a judge’s time with tedious details like mitigating circumstances when the city council can just distribute pre-printed, combined citations and verdicts in a single document? It’s administrative efficiency at its finest: instant guilt, standardized penalties, and absolutely no courtroom drama required.

 

We should marvel at the sheer mathematical wizardry on display here. The community explicitly reports that illegal fireworks are down, yet citation numbers are up. One can only conclude that either the GBPD has mastered the art of citing people who haven’t lit a match, or their new eye-in-the-sky drones are so desperate for a target that they are matching thermal signatures to innocent sparklers. It’s a bold new era of law enforcement: when the supply of actual crime decreases, you simply increase the efficiency of the dragnet to keep the numbers lucrative.


2

Too bad those who received the citations can just ignore them, and not worry about paying since the city did not set up a mechanism to ultimately collect citation fines. Again taxpayer money going to pay for high priced administrations, since we are told we must to get good people, which is clearly not true.


2