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The Ten Most Common 911 Call Types in Seattle — and What They Tell Us

Published May 5, 2026 · Updated October 13, 2026 · 9 minute read

Half of everything the Seattle Fire Department was dispatched to over the past year carried a single label: "Aid Response." Of the 112,001 fire and EMS incidents logged between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026, 55,737 — 49.8% — were basic medical aid calls. Seattle Police, over the same twelve months, were dispatched to 248,389 events generated by calls from the public, and the three biggest categories were traffic, disturbances and suspicious circumstances. Violent crime, the subject of most public-safety headlines, makes up a small slice of that volume.

This article ranks the ten most common incident types for each agency using a full year of the city's own dispatch records, explains what each label means operationally, and lays out what the mix says about how Seattle's emergency system actually spends its time.

Seattle Fire: the top ten incident types

The Seattle Fire Real-Time 911 dataset records every incident the department is dispatched to, with the incident type assigned at dispatch. Across the twelve months there were 133 distinct type labels, but the distribution is extremely lopsided: the top ten account for 82.5% of all incidents, and the top two — both medical — account for 60.3%.

What each fire type means

Aid Response (55,737). A basic-life-support medical call, answered by firefighters trained as EMTs on an engine, ladder or aid unit. This is the bread-and-butter call of the department: falls, illness, breathing complaints, injuries and other medical problems that call-takers do not classify as needing paramedics at dispatch. At about 153 a day, it is more common than every other type on this list combined.

Medic Response (11,781). A call that gets a paramedic (advanced life support) unit from the outset because the information given to the call-taker suggests a life-threatening problem. Including the related labels "Medic Response- Overdose," "Medic Response- 7 per Rule" and "Medic Response- 6 per Rule," the medic family totals 14,426 incidents, or 12.9%.

Auto Fire Alarm (6,939). An automatic fire-alarm system has reported an activation, usually from a monitored commercial or multi-unit building. Crews respond to every one without knowing in advance whether there is a fire. A separate label, "Automatic Fire Alarm Resd," adds another 1,328 residential activations, and "Alarm Bell" adds 1,156.

Aid Response Yellow (4,943). A variant of Aid Response. The "Red" and "Yellow" suffixes appear on several Seattle Fire type labels and mark different dispatch priorities within the same call family; the public dataset does not publish a formal definition, so we do not try to rank it by urgency here.

Illegal Burn (2,874). A report of outdoor burning that should not be happening — smoke or flames from an open fire in a yard, a vacant lot, a park or a street. It is the most common fire-related label by a wide margin, and it is strongly seasonal in the opposite direction from what you might expect: it peaked in January (322 incidents) and bottomed out in July (148). The data does not say who lit the fires or why, but the pattern is the reverse of brush fires, which spike in summer.

MVI – Motor Vehicle Incident (2,531). A traffic collision where the fire department is sent, typically for possible injuries, fluid leaks or a trapped occupant. Freeway collisions carry their own label, "MVI Freeway" (351).

Rescue Elevator (2,097). People stuck in an elevator. In a city with this many mid- and high-rise buildings, it is a steady workload — nearly six a day — and it follows the rhythm of building occupancy, peaking in the 5 p.m. hour, around the evening commute.

Investigate Out Of Service (2,058). A catch-all for situations a unit checks out that do not fit a more specific label. The dataset records only the label, not what crews found.

Rubbish Fire (1,719). A trash fire outdoors: garbage cans, debris piles, refuse. Dumpster fires have their own label (395).

Low Acuity Response (1,682). A medical call judged at dispatch to be low acuity — real enough to need a response, but not an emergency on the scale of an Aid or Medic call. A separate "Low Acuity Referral" label (79 incidents) also appears in the data.

The fire department is mostly an EMS agency

Group every label that is clearly medical — aid, medic, overdose, low-acuity, medical-alarm, crisis and similar types — and medical calls come to 80,459 incidents, about 72 percent of the year. Automatic alarms of every kind add roughly 10 percent. Labels that describe an actual fire or illegal burn total 6,322, about 5.6 percent, and most of those are outdoor: illegal burns, rubbish, brush and dumpster fires. "Fire in Building," the label for an interior structure fire, appears just 250 times — 0.2% of the year's incidents.

That roughly-three-quarters medical share lines up with the department's own accounting. Seattle Fire's 2025 annual report lists 64,693 basic-life-support and 14,599 advanced-life-support responses out of 108,763 total — about 73 percent EMS. The department's name describes its history and its most dangerous work, but its daily workload is overwhelmingly medical. That is why the siren you hear in your neighborhood is far more likely to be headed to a fall or a breathing problem than to a fire.

Seattle Police: the top ten event groups

The SPD Call Data dataset is structured differently. It has one row for every responding unit, so a single incident with four patrol cars appears four times. We counted distinct CAD events instead: 346,271 over the year, of which 248,389 were dispatched in response to calls from the community and 97,882 were "on-view" events that officers initiated themselves, such as a traffic stop. The rankings below use the 248,389 dispatched events — about 681 a day — because they reflect what residents are calling about.

What the police groups mean

Traffic (40,642). The single largest group, covering traffic-related calls such as collisions and problems on the roadway. One in six community-generated police dispatches falls here.

Disturbance (37,082). Noise, fights or arguments, people behaving disruptively. Domestic incidents are tracked separately, in their own group.

Suspicious Circumstances (35,897). Something a caller thought looked wrong — a person, a vehicle, an open door. The label records the caller's concern at the time of the call, not what officers found when they arrived. Our glossary of SPD call types explains how these labels relate to final dispositions.

Assist Public (20,572). Requests for police help that are not reports of a crime. It is a broad service category, and its size is a reminder of how much of 911 is about people who need help rather than people who have done something wrong.

Theft (12,932). Reported thefts, including shoplifting. Vehicle-related reports fall mostly into a separate group, "Automobiles," which ranks eleventh with 8,092 events.

Crisis Complaint (12,541). Calls involving a person in behavioral or mental-health crisis. At about 34 a day, they outnumber assaults.

Prowler (9,740). Reports of someone lurking around or trying to get into property where they should not be.

Domestic Disturbance/Violence (9,581). Incidents between family members or intimate partners, ranging from arguments to assaults. Domestic-violence calls carry their own legal requirements in Washington, which is one reason SPD tracks them as a separate group.

Assaults (9,188). Reported assaults outside the domestic category. This is the only group in the top ten that is, by definition, a violent crime.

Assist Other Agency (8,700). Officers sent to help another agency — for example the fire department at a medical or traffic scene, or a neighboring police department.

Most police calls are not violent crime

Traffic, disturbances and suspicious circumstances together make up 45.7% of all dispatched events. Add Assist Public and the share passes half. By contrast, the three groups that most clearly describe violent crime — Assaults (9,188), Robbery (1,180) and Rape (659) — total 11,027, or 4.4% of dispatched events. Even counting every domestic call as violent, which overstates it, the share would be 8.3%.

The priority codes tell a similar story. SPD assigns Priority 1 to calls involving an immediate threat to life. Over the year, 34,351 dispatched events — 13.8% — were P1. Priority 2 was the largest band at 39.0%.

None of this means violent crime is unimportant. A small number of calls account for most of the harm, and they take far more officer time per incident than a parking complaint. But it does mean that the volume of police work is dominated by traffic, conflict, uncertainty and requests for help — the kinds of calls where the question of who is best placed to respond is a live one. Calls like Crisis Complaint and Assist Public are the reason Seattle, like many cities, has been experimenting with non-police responders for some situations.

What the two lists say together

Put the two agencies side by side and a consistent picture emerges. Seattle's 911 system is mostly a system for medical problems, traffic, and people in some kind of trouble or conflict. Fires and violent crimes are real and serious, but they are a small fraction of the call volume. That matters when you read the live feed: a busy map is mostly a measure of how many people live, work and move through an area, not how dangerous it is. Our article on why some neighborhoods generate more dispatch traffic looks at that in detail, and the guide to Seattle Fire response codes covers how the fire labels map to apparatus.

Caveats

• Labels are dispatch-time classifications. Both datasets record what a call was believed to be when units were sent. A "Suspicious Circumstances" call can turn out to be nothing or to be a burglary; an "Aid Response" can be upgraded to a paramedic call on scene. Neither list measures what actually happened.
• Counting units differ. The fire dataset has one row per incident. The SPD dataset has one row per responding unit, so we counted distinct CAD event numbers; counting raw rows (605,695) would inflate police volume by about 1.75 times and over-weight incidents that draw many officers.
• Calls are not crimes. SPD dispatch data is not crime data. Many dispatched events do not result in a report, and many crimes are reported without a 911 dispatch.
• Our groupings are approximate. The "medical" and "fire" totals above group dataset labels by name. A few labels are ambiguous, and incident types outside the 60 most common (841 incidents) were left ungrouped.

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