San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors will take up the question of reviving the city’s dog bite court next month, with 61 cases sitting idle and annual bite reports now topping 900.
Supervisor Stephen Sherrill pushed the board this week to reopen the Department of Police Accountability’s Vicious and Dangerous Dog unit hearings, known informally as dog court, which has been shut down since 2024 when the city ran out of funding for it. “The money is there, the position is there,” Sherrill said. “Like, let’s get this built. Let’s get this going.”
The numbers behind the push are hard to ignore. San Francisco Police Department bite reports climbed from 760 in 2023 to 868 in 2024, then jumped to 926 in 2025. That’s a trajectory running in exactly the wrong direction while the court’s capacity collapsed. The court heard 159 cases back in 2020, when bite reports were at their lowest, around 590. By 2024, it was handling just 42. In 2025, it managed 32.
The court was briefly resurrected in January 2025 before shutting down again that July. The court’s longtime judge was fired the same month, and no replacement was hired.
Without an active court, the SFPD’s Vicious and Dangerous Dog Unit still investigates bites but can’t enforce orders for muzzling or mandatory obedience training. There’s no mechanism to compel compliance. The 61 pending cases, reported by SFist, represent real incidents where victims have come forward and nothing has happened since.
Sherrill framed the push squarely as a board accountability issue. “This is part of the board’s oversight responsibilities,” he said. “We’re responsible for overseeing and making sure things get done.”
Underreporting makes the situation worse than the numbers show. In the Tenderloin, where many residents live outdoors and keep dogs for protection, bite victims frequently stay quiet to avoid conflict with owners who are also their neighbors. “The homeless credo is if you get bitten, you don’t say anything, or you’re a rat,” said Aaron Wilson, who spoke about the dynamic with Mission Local.
The Tenderloin.
That neighborhood’s police station launched its own enforcement effort in February, an operation officers nicknamed “Paw Patrol.” Eleven citations went out that month for off-leash or unregistered dogs. Officers have also been walking the neighborhood to explain leash laws and registration requirements to residents, a ground-level approach that works better than issuing tickets to people who don’t know the rules to begin with. The SFPD also revised its policies last year to have officers prioritize leash-law enforcement, with citations or warnings for dogs off-leash outside designated parks. Citations are a start, but without a functioning court behind them, the system lacks teeth when cases get serious enough to warrant a hearing.
San Francisco isn’t alone in wrestling with how to structure animal control adjudication, and advocates for tougher enforcement have long pointed to bite court as the piece of the system that actually forces accountability on owners whose dogs have hurt people. Civil liability exists, but it’s slow and expensive. Bite court was designed to move faster and to impose practical consequences, muzzle orders, training mandates, restrictions on where a dog could go, that could reduce repeat incidents before anyone got seriously hurt again.
For context on how dog bite injuries are categorized and tracked nationally, the CDC documents bite severity using established scales that many local jurisdictions, including San Francisco, use when assessing whether a dog poses an ongoing threat.
The board is expected to address the matter formally next month. Sherrill’s message to his colleagues was blunt: the infrastructure exists, the funding is allocated, and 61 people are waiting for something to happen.