A brief history of dog waste 311 complaints logged for Brooklyn

To pedestrians, the sidewalks of NYC have always been potential minefields of trash, debris, mystery puddles, and other unwanted unsightly obstacles that can be categorized as “Dirty Conditions”. Even the most vigilant pedestrian is subject to encountering perhaps the most menacing of these items: DOG WASTE. To help keep NYC community members more on their toes as they navigate their neighborhoods, public data is available to help identify the times of year when NYC’s most impacted borough, Brooklyn, suffered the most complaints. We can then track whether there was a pattern that could inform citizens of when Brooklynites are most often reporting this condition on their streets through the filing of complaints through the city’s NYC 311 portal.

What can we look at?

Using the 311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present dataset found at NYC Open Data, I was able to filter through almost 40 million records that dated back to 2010. I chose to focus on the Complaint Type “Dirty Conditions“, under which the Complaint Descriptor “dog waste” falls. Data for dog waste complaints dates only as far back mid-September of 2021. When querying the dataset for Dirty Conditions, I isolated the period that only included complete months, resulting in a window of October 2021 through the last current full month of February 2025. In order to compare the number of complaints specific to dog waste with other common descriptors, I included only those that were labeled in the data as specific issues. This meant excluding the much more generic and more popular “Trash” descriptor, for which there was a disproportionate amount of complaints, as these complaints didn’t productively contribute to the analysis of specific dirty conditions that were being submitted by the public.

What’s dirty in Brooklyn?

Of Brooklyn’s five comparable specific (i.e. not generically labeled “Trash”) 311 Dirty Conditions complaint descriptors, dog waste is the top complaint, beating out broken glass, dirt/gravel, syringes and car debris. Additionally, dog waste showed a much stronger upward trend, with numbers growing year over year much more sharply than the other types of specific complaints.

What’s Happening Across the Year?

We can see seasonality playing a part in the number of all combined Dirty Conditions 311 complaints, likely accounting for the fluctuation in the amount of time New Yorkers are spending outside and how that aligns with warmer, more pleasant weather. Below we see noticeable peaks of # of complaints filed, typically in the summer months of July through September year over year. While not necessarily a peak month during the year, February registers on the high end of the spectrum as far as # of complaints.

Dog Waste Complaints Follow A Unique Seasonality

The data from 2021-2025 shows a different story with regard to when dog waste complaints were most common, where year over year, the month of February is clearly the peak. In addition, this February peak is trending upward each year. This results in an average of about 94 complaints for each of the four Februarys that were recorded during this timespan.

Why February?

The observer can begin to speculate: What is it about the month of February that continuously accounted for such a significant portion of the dog waste complaints? Each year, complaints tapered from the summer peaks through the end of autumn, returning upward after December. With the exception of 2023, every February was accompanied by a steep peak, then immediate drop month over month. Was there a more widespread issue of uncleaned dog waste in Brooklyn’s streets in February? Or did the month of February simply attract more complaints from Brooklyn’s citizens? Let’s see if this is unique to the troubled borough of Brooklyn…

When combining the 311 complaints received city-wide, February continues to stand out as the main offending month. But this begs a deeper exploration into what it is about this particular month that serves as the peak of complaints…

A few possible explanations can be offered:
February is typically the coldest month of the year, resulting in less foot traffic than other months. However, dog owners still need to go out to walk their dogs. For those non-dog owners who are out on the streets, are they seeing an increase in uncleaned dog waste due to the crummy cold weather? It’s possible that dog-owners are in more of a rush to get back inside, and less effort is being paid to cleaning up after their dogs during this time.
Perhaps citizens who are outside in the month of February are particularly resentful of February’s cold conditions, and therefore more inclined to lodge a formal complaint with 311.
Another consideration is the nature of the violation: uncleaned dog waste is tied to personal accountability, and a dirty condition that can (or should) be controlled. This may have more to do with why New Yorkers lodge more of these 311 complaints than any of the other four descriptors. Does the foul weather temper impact their tolerability more so in February?
It’s important to consider the fact that, above all, these complaints are voluntary and the data around this issue is dependent upon, and reflective of the type of New Yorker who would formally lodge a complaint against uncleaned dog waste. It’s possible that this type of person is biased towards this violation, and even inclined to file repeated complaints over time. Apparently, they all come out in February…

Conclusion

The leaders at NYC’s 311 division can take these findings into consideration as they use this data in conjunction with additional stats when tracking the number of dog waste complaints (such as number of dog owners in specific neighborhoods) when comparing the volume of dog waste complaints over time. If dog owner accountability is part of the solution to manage such complaints, city law enforcement can heed these findings and target the specific month of February when looking for violators, and start issuing summonses if they want to make an impact on cleaning up the streets of Brooklyn and the rest of NYC.