Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office pins increase in liquor law violations on Isla Vista

The number of liquor law violations reported in the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office’s coverage areas nearly doubled from 2023 to 2024, according to newly released statistics.

Chief Deputy Brad Welch, who helped compile the report, said the 89.7 percent increase—from 573 violations in 2023 to 1,087 in 2024—correlates with an increase in enforcement, specifically in Isla Vista.

Thanks to an Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) grant, the Sheriff’s Office can afford additional overtime hours and other resources for deputies patrolling the college town. Of the more than 1,000 liquor law violations across several cities and the county’s unincorporated areas in 2024, 946 of them were in Isla Vista, according to the report.

“A lot of those liquor law, public drunkenness, and disorderly [violations] come from Isla Vista and are tied to not just Deltopia. A lot of the time, … we get an increased amount of statistics coming through our fall orientation period,” said Welch, who’s acted as incident commander during Deltopia’s annual outdoor festivities on Del Playa for the past four years.

According to the report, 289 of the 351 disorderly violations occurred in Isla Vista. Buellton and Solvang, which contract with the Sheriff’s Office for law enforcement, had three and four disorderly violations, respectively, in 2024. 

As for public drunkenness, Isla Vista’s number of violations jumped from 53 in 2023 to 71 in 2024, the highest it’s been in four years, according to the report. Welch said many of these violations happen during the first weeks of UCSB’s fall term.

“When you have a whole new class of students who are unaware, or are just ignorant of the liquor laws within California, … there’s a lot of citations that go out through that fall period, which can spike the numbers,” Welch said. 

The disparity between alcohol-related violations reported during Deltopia festivities each spring and the rest of the calendar year amounts to “a bad representation of Isla Vista as a whole,” Welch said. 

A Sheriff’s Office Deltopia weekend recap from last year showed that law enforcement issued 256 citations and made 32 arrests from April 5 through 7 in 2024. This year, law enforcement issued 485 citations and made 84 arrests from April 4 to 6, according to the Sheriff’s Office. 

“I think if anything, it casts a bad shadow on that area, just for that weekend. But I love Isla Vista. It’s one of my favorite stations to work at,” Welch said. “[As] an unsanctioned party, we would rather [Deltopia] not occur, but … it’s a 48-hour period. There’s 363 more days in Isla Vista that it remains a wonderful community.”

Welch also described Deltopia as having “a significant strain” on emergency services each year in more areas across Santa Barbara County than many realize.

“It really decreases available ambulances and paramedics for everybody else in the county. I don’t think a lot of people understand that,” Welch said. “With all the ambulances with AMR [American Medical Response] are pushed to Isla Vista trying to do transports for public intoxication, that can affect somebody that’s having a cardiac event in Lompoc.”

This article appears in Apr 17-27, 2025.