Carl,
Your suggestion to "make it too hot for them to ignore it" might be the only solution in the long run. I don't want to present too many tedious details, but the situation in my neighborhood actually involves a two-front war which has been going on for more than a year.
The dog issue had a long history of problems: 7 large dogs (4 over the legal limit), 2 to 3 of them running loose daily and threatening pedestrians and bicyclists, offensive odors and flies, and aggressive barking for as long as 5 hours continuously. After many months of animal control using delay tactics and doing little more than go through the motions of handling the problems, I asked the city manager to intervene. The result was forced removal of 4 dogs, partial curtailing of dogs running loose, and clean up. But the barking has continued so badly that neighbors sometimes scream at the dogs to shut up.
The city's ordinance against barking dogs is sometimes called the "three household rule." Three households must sign a petition and be willing to appear in court. That can be an almost insurmountable obstacle. One source on the Internet stated that similar laws were passed throughout the country because of lobbying by dog products industries which wanted to make it very difficult to file a complaint against barking dogs which might discourage dog ownership. But as the petitioners in my neighborhood have discovered, even the petition can be ignored. The real problem is unwilling enforcement.
A related problem is that the city has hired out many of its services to outside private businesses, and animal control is one of them. Its employees are often non-residents who seem far more sympathetic to problem dogs than to resident complaints.
The other major issue in the neighborhood is a separate and more complex one, involving drug dealing, attempts to form a neighborhood gang, and the use of booming bass from vehicles around the clock to harass the neighborhood. That problem began within a few weeks of new neighbors moving in. I believe that the police are monitoring the drug activity. But calling police about the noise is useless, because of - once again - an unwillingness to enforce the noise ordinances. In spite of getting a copy of the ordinances, talking to the police department, and complaining to the city council, I still cannot get anyone to explain exactly what rules the police are following, and whether they can issue citations to violators (they never have). If a complaint is called in, the most the police will do is ask the violators to turn down the volume. Of course, the violators have learned that they can just ignore the police.
Moreover, the police department seems to be adopting a discouraging policy of do-it-yourself enforcement. They claim that they can do nothing about the noise, and request, instead, that the complainant file a citizen's arrest warrant against each violator. Everyone I've talked to, including a city council member, as well as a former candidate for the council, has strongly cautioned against following that recommendation. Moreover, there are dozens of violators, including neighborhood visitors and passing vehicles, so that filing warrants is not even remotely practical, not to mention dangerous if gang members are involved.
