There’s a new top dog coming to San Francisco’s canine court.
After what will likely end up being a year-long hiatus, so-called Vicious and Dangerous Dog hearings will return to San Francisco with a dedicated hearing officer, the city’s public safety chief Steven Betz said at a Board of Supervisors committee hearing Thursday.
The announcement comes three months after Mission Local reported a rise in dog-bite incidents across San Francisco, alongside a backlog of cases. Over a quarter of the dog bites reported to the San Francisco Police Department, Captain Matt Sullivan said at that time, took place in the Tenderloin.
Dog court, as it’s known, was functionally discontinued by the Department of Police Accountability in July 2025, with no hearing officer to oversee cases and a growing backlog of dog-bite reports. That backlog currently stands at 66 pending cases before the court, and 15 more under review by the SFPD, which maintains its own vicious and dangerous dog unit.
The suspension of dog court has left many bite victims to fend for themselves. Mission Local in March spoke to former RV residents who said they were left to advocate, on their own, for some measure of accountability for the dogs that had mauled them.
And in neighborhoods with large homeless populations like the Tenderloin, where dogs are popular companions and guards, bites often go unreported. “The homeless credo is if you get bitten, you don’t say anything, or you’re a rat,” a former RV resident, Aaron Wilson, told Mission Local in March.
The Department of Police Accountability, which has held the hearings since 2018, discontinued the program last year, citing budget cuts. The court will now be underwritten out of the same funding bucket established for the program years ago.
The Department of Police Accountability had received $100,000 in city funds in 2018 to operate the program. Director Paul Henderson said at Thursday’s hearing that “sustaining this additional workload became increasingly difficult” in the years leading up to the program’s suspension.
Betz outlined a plan to hire a new hearing officer to fill the vacant seat and oversee dog court. The plan also includes employing SFPD staff already on the payroll for “clerical” work.
Thursday’s hearing was called by District 2 supervisor Stephen Sherrill, who has taken up the issue of the lapsed program in recent months.
“Without these hearings, there are real costs, both human and canine,” Sherrill said at the outset of the committee hearing. He has worked with SFDOG, an advocacy group for “responsible dog ownership.”
“A functioning hearing process protects both public safety and animal welfare. It can resolve serious situations before they escalate further,” said Sally Stevens, chair of SFDOG, at the hearing.
Sherrill was joined by District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who co-sponsored Thursday’s hearing and in whose district dog bites are a persistent problem.
Mahmood, in an exchange with Virginia Donahue, executive director of Animal Care and Control, asked whether the reinstatement of dog court would help prevent bite attacks.
“I wish I could wave a magic wand and prevent all dog bites. I don’t think we can do that. We certainly stress education,” Donahue said. “I don’t see our department expanding into that area at this time, but I agree it’s super important.”
“I think it rests with us, but like every other department in the city, we’re shrinking,” Donahue added after Mahmood asked if another department should work on preventing dog bites.
Donahue also told the supervisors that “well under 10 percent” of dog court cases resulted in euthanasia.
Sherrill, for his part, said after the hearing that hiring a dog-court hearing officer was “not part of police accountability’s core mission” and that, “facing budget cuts, they’ve made different decisions.”
“Hard to blame them for that,” Sherrill said. But, he added, the reinstatement is “definitely a good step forward after nearly a year of, frankly, uncertainty.”
