San Francisco leaders push to restart dog court amid bite surge

A dog can still bite, a report can still be filed and San Francisco police can still investigate. What the city has lacked for nearly a year is the hearing officer who turns those cases into consequences.

Supervisor Stephen Sherrill is pushing to restart the city’s so-called dog court as bite reports climb and 61 cases remain queued for hearings. City records and police policy show the process is supposed to let a victim, owner, SFPD member, Animal Control Officer or Department of Public Health representative request a Vicious and Dangerous Dog hearing, with one supervisory officer designated by the police chief to preside. Without that step, the San Francisco Police Department’s Vicious and Dangerous Dog Unit can investigate, but it cannot finish the enforcement chain.

The stakes are not abstract. San Francisco logged more than 900 recorded dog bites last year, up from 450 the year before, according to figures cited in local reporting. In one recent case, a 3-year-old was attacked, and an exclusive report said the dog involved had already bitten another dog before that incident. That history is exactly what the city’s dangerous-dog process is meant to catch before repeat aggression escalates into a more serious injury.

San Francisco’s Health Code defines a biting dog as one that bites a person or other animal in the city when the person or animal was not provoking or teasing it. The remedies available through the hearing process can include muzzling, mandatory obedience training and, in the most severe cases, removal of the dog. City materials show the framework is still on the books even while the hearing officer post has stayed vacant.

The gap has left residents seeing enforcement as incomplete. In Cow Hollow, one resident described watching a large dog bite a person and another dog, then seeing the owner walk away. Another said the lack of accountability is especially hard to understand for people walking smaller dogs, who worry about being exposed to a dangerous animal with no meaningful follow-through from City Hall.

Sherrill has framed the vacancy as a basic oversight failure. The Board of Supervisors, he argues, has a responsibility to make sure a funded position already on the books is filled. That broader structure matters because the Commission of Animal Control and Welfare is advisory only, while final policy decisions on animal matters rest with the Board of Supervisors, the mayor and the city administrator.

The backlog sits inside a larger public-safety workload. San Francisco Animal Care and Control logged 3,094 emergency calls for service from April through June 2025, then 2,605 more from January through March 2026. For a city already handling a heavy flow of emergency calls, the suspended dog court has become another sign that a familiar neighborhood risk is still waiting for a decision.