SF Board to Consider Reopening Dog Court With 61 Cases Pending

Sixty-one dog bite cases are sitting in a backlog with no hearing date, and San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors is moving to do something about it.

Supervisor Stephen Sherrill pressed the board this week to reopen the Department of Police Accountability’s dog bite hearings, known as dog court, which lost funding and went dark in 2024. “The money is there, the position is there,” Sherrill said. “Like, let’s get this built. Let’s get this going.” He’s framing the push as basic board function. “This is part of the board’s oversight responsibilities,” he said. “We’re responsible for overseeing and making sure things get done.”

The caseload context matters. Bite reports filed with the San Francisco Police Department climbed from 760 in 2023 to 868 in 2024, then hit 926 in 2025. Those numbers are moving in one direction while the court’s output collapsed. In 2020, when annual bites were near their floor around 590, dog court handled 159 cases. By 2024, that number had dropped to 42. In 2025, it processed just 32.

The court did briefly reopen in January 2025 before shutting down again that July. The judge who’d run it for years was fired the same month. No replacement was hired.

That vacancy left the SFPD’s Vicious and Dangerous Dog Unit in an awkward position. Officers still respond to bite incidents and complete investigations, but they can’t enforce remedies like muzzling orders or mandatory obedience training without a functioning court behind them. There’s no mechanism to compel owners to do anything. The 61 pending cases, reported by SFist, aren’t abstractions. They’re real bites, real victims who came forward, and nothing has moved.

The official numbers don’t capture the full picture. In the Tenderloin, underreporting is built into the social dynamics of the neighborhood. Many residents live outdoors and keep dogs for protection. Biting incidents that happen within that community often don’t get reported because victims don’t want to cause problems with people who are also their neighbors. Aaron Wilson, who spoke with Mission Local about the issue, put it plainly: “The homeless credo is if you get bitten, you don’t say anything, or you’re a rat.”

So the 926 reported bites in 2025 are probably a floor, not a ceiling.

The Tenderloin station didn’t wait for dog court to come back. Officers launched a ground-level enforcement push in February 2026, running an operation they called “Paw Patrol.” Eleven citations went out that month for off-leash or unregistered dogs. Officers also walked the neighborhood to explain leash laws and registration requirements directly to residents, which the department found more effective than writing tickets to people who didn’t know the rules existed.

The SFPD also updated its enforcement policies to make leash-law compliance a priority, with officers issuing warnings or citations for dogs found off-leash outside designated parks. It’s a practical step, but animal control adjudication requires a hearing body to have any real teeth. Citations can document problems, they can’t resolve them.

That’s where dog court’s absence is felt most. Without hearings, the process stops at investigation. Owners who’ve been identified as responsible for bites face no formal accountability. Cases sit. Victims don’t hear back.

Sherrill’s push is headed to the full board. The funding and the position for the court already exist, he says. What’s been missing is the political pressure to act on it. In 2026, with bite totals continuing to climb and dozens of cases waiting, that pressure is now in writing.