The Ten Most Common 911 Call Types in Seattle — and What They Tell Us
Published May 5, 2026 · 12 minute read
Across roughly 350,000 fire and EMS calls per year handled by Seattle Fire, and roughly 500,000 calls for service handled by Seattle Police, the call-type distribution is heavily skewed. Ten categories account for the large majority of all volume. Knowing which ones, in what order, and roughly in what proportion makes the live feed considerably easier to read. It also corrects a few common misconceptions about what the city actually spends its public-safety time on.
1. AID Response — medical aid calls (roughly 45 percent of fire dispatches)
This is the single biggest category and it isn't close. The Seattle Fire Department's BLS aid units handle close to a thousand AID Response calls per week across the city. They cover falls, breathing difficulty that doesn't rise to a paramedic-level concern, alcohol-related medical events, low-blood-sugar episodes, minor traumatic injuries, generalized weakness, and so on. The single most common AID Response in Seattle is for a fall — and the great majority of those falls involve adults over 65.
What it tells us: the bulk of what we call the "fire department" is actually emergency medical service. SFD's mission is roughly 80 percent EMS by call volume and roughly 15 percent fire by call volume, with everything else (rescues, hazmat, alarms) making up the remainder. The "fire" department label is a historical artifact more than a description of what the department does day-to-day.
2. Auto Fire Alarm — alarm activations (roughly 12 percent of fire dispatches)
Alarms — residential, commercial, high-rise — are the second-largest fire dispatch category. The overwhelming majority are non-fire activations: burnt food, faulty detectors, construction dust, false alarms from triggered pull stations. SFD's standard policy is to dispatch a response to every alarm anyway because the cost of missing a real fire is much greater than the cost of responding to a non-fire activation.
What it tells us: false alarms are an enormous workload. Seattle has had ongoing conversations about adopting fee structures for chronic false-alarm offenders (typically large commercial buildings with poorly maintained systems), and the dispatch data is what makes those conversations possible in the first place. The data also reveals that high-rise alarm activations are over-represented relative to the number of high-rises in the city — the legacy fire suppression systems in older towers generate noise that newer buildings don't.
3. Medic Response — paramedic-level medical calls (roughly 7 percent of fire dispatches)
Roughly 24,000 paramedic-level calls per year. Cardiac arrests, severe traumas, strokes, severe respiratory distress, drug overdoses requiring ALS-level intervention. The seven Medic units that handle these calls are unusually busy by national standards — Seattle's Medic 1 program is one of the most studied paramedic services in the country, in part because the workload is heavy and in part because the survival outcomes are unusually good.
What it tells us: the paramedic system in Seattle is doing meaningful work. The dispatch data combined with Medic 1's published outcomes shows a system that gets to high-acuity calls quickly and intervenes effectively. The improvement in cardiac-arrest survival rates over the past three decades is one of the genuine quiet success stories of Seattle's public-safety infrastructure.
4. MVA — Motor vehicle accidents (roughly 6 percent of fire dispatches, plus SPD)
The fire side of MVAs (with or without injury) accounts for around 20,000 calls a year. Add SPD's collision clearances and the total approaches 40,000 — a hundred a day, roughly. The dispatch pattern follows the road network: heavy concentration along I-5, the Aurora corridor, Rainier Avenue, and the major arterials. Time-of-day patterns are obvious — morning and evening rush hour peaks, late-night impaired-driving peaks.
What it tells us: vehicle infrastructure imposes a continuous public-safety cost. The Seattle Vision Zero program — aiming for zero traffic fatalities by 2030 — uses dispatch data heavily in deciding which intersections to engineer, where to lower speed limits, and where to add protected bike lanes. The patterns shift slowly but they do shift. Lower Rainier Avenue, after speed-limit and signal-timing changes, generates noticeably fewer collision dispatches today than it did five years ago.
5. SPD — Trespass / Premise Check (roughly 8 percent of SPD clearances)
"Trespass — Premise Check" is the SPD analogue to the fire-alarm category. Property owners and managers, especially downtown commercial properties, request regular police checks. The numbers are large and the resolution rate is high — most clear without any further action.
What it tells us: a meaningful fraction of police time is allocated to property-management support rather than to active criminal incidents. Whether that is the best use of officer time is a live policy question in Seattle. The dispatch data is what lets the conversation be empirical rather than rhetorical.
6. SPD — Disturbance (roughly 7 percent of SPD clearances)
The "Disturbance" family — verbal, group, noise, DV-without-assault — is roughly 7 percent of SPD's clearance volume. The vast majority involve no arrest and no charges. The category is a snapshot of where neighbor-on-neighbor frictions, late-night party complaints, and family disputes are calling for outside intervention.
What it tells us: a lot of what 911 actually handles is conflict management, not crime. The recent expansion of Seattle's CARES — Community Assisted Response and Engagement — program is partly about routing some of these calls to non-police responders trained in mediation. The dispatch data is the input that defines which call types are candidates for that routing.
7. SPD — Suspicious Person / Suspicious Circumstance (roughly 6 percent of SPD clearances)
As discussed in our SPD call-types glossary, "Suspicious" reflects a caller's report, not an officer's finding. The clearance rate to no-action is very high. The geographic distribution of "Suspicious" calls correlates more strongly with caller demographics than with any objective measure of unusual activity.
What it tells us: the "Suspicious" category, more than any other, is a signal of who is calling rather than what is happening. Many cities have debated whether to retain the category at all or to require call-takers to elicit a more specific complaint. Seattle retains it because it provides a useful catch-all when the caller cannot articulate what is wrong but believes something is.
8. Investigate (Smoke, Odor, Out of Service) — fire investigation calls (roughly 4 percent of fire dispatches)
The investigate family is the "check it out" category — smoke smell, gas smell, damaged hydrants, post-event investigation requests. Most resolve as nothing requiring further action. A non-trivial minority resolve as actual structure fires that hadn't yet been called in as such, or as natural-gas leaks that did require utility-company response.
What it tells us: routine investigation calls are the cheapest insurance policy in the dispatch system. Most resolve as nothing. The ones that don't are exactly the kind of calls that prevent a small problem from becoming a large one.
9. SPD — Theft and Shoplifting (roughly 5 percent of SPD clearances combined)
The theft family is concentrated heavily in downtown commercial corridors and along U-District Avenue. Shoplifting calls in particular have become a heavily debated category in Seattle as retail loss-prevention practices have changed and as some major retailers have closed downtown locations citing the trend.
What it tells us: the dispatch data shows the volume but not the resolution. Whether a shoplifting call results in an arrest, a trespass warning, or a no-contact disposition depends on circumstances that aren't published in the clearance data. The dispatch feed is a reasonable measure of how often retailers are calling for assistance; it is not a reasonable measure of how much retail theft is actually happening.
10. SPD — 911 Hangup / Investigation (roughly 4 percent of SPD clearances)
Rounding out the top ten: the 911-hangup category is calls where the caller disconnected before speaking or where only background noise was heard. SPD is required by policy to investigate every one. The vast majority — pocket dials, accidental child dials, modern smartphones' panic features triggering accidentally — resolve as no incident. They generate a meaningful workload anyway, partly because each one consumes an officer's time to physically verify there is no emergency.
What's missing from the top ten
It is worth noting what is not on this list. Violent crime — assault, robbery, homicide — is not in the top ten by volume. Aggravated assault accounts for around 2 percent of SPD clearances. Robbery is under 1 percent. Homicide is well under one tenth of one percent. The high-severity violent calls that dominate news coverage are a small fraction of the dispatch workload, even though they account for a large fraction of the harm. Volume and severity have a weak relationship.
Active fires — structure fires, vehicle fires, vegetation fires — are also not in the top ten. They combine to roughly 3 percent of fire dispatches. The "fire" department, again, mostly does medicine.
The honest read
If you ranked Seattle's emergency response by raw call volume, you'd get a picture dominated by older adults falling, false alarms, fender-benders, and welfare-check requests. That picture is genuinely how the city's public-safety system spends most of its time. The high-severity events that make headlines are real, they matter enormously, but they are not where the workload lives. Reading the live feed with that in mind makes it harder to draw conclusions that the data does not actually support — and makes it easier to see the patterns that are actually there.