Public Safety Open Data in the Pacific Northwest: A Field Guide
Published May 11, 2026 · 13 minute read
Seattle is unusually good at public-safety open data by national standards. Its real-time fire dispatch feed is refreshed every five minutes. Its police call data is comprehensive, well-documented, and stably maintained. The civic-tech community in Seattle has built a steady output of dashboards, research papers, and analytics products on top of it. But Seattle is not the only jurisdiction in the region publishing public-safety data, and the variations between cities reveal a lot about local policy priorities. This article is a tour.
Seattle: the gold standard, with caveats
The City of Seattle's open-data portal (data.seattle.gov) publishes:
- Seattle Real Time Fire 911 Calls — near-real-time, comprehensive, geocoded, well-documented. The single most useful real-time public-safety feed in the region.
- SPD Call Data — police calls for service, published after clearance and updated daily, with priority, response-time fields, and locations generalized to the police beat. Comprehensive in scope but delayed.
- SPD Crime Data — completed crime reports, published with a longer delay and richer detail.
- SPD Use of Force — every reportable use-of-force event by SPD officers, with type, demographic, and outcome fields.
- SPD Officer-Involved Shootings — a separate, narrower dataset of OIS events with case-level detail.
- Fire Inspections — building-level fire inspection results, useful for assessing the safety of older commercial structures.
- Fire Stations — locations of SFD's stations.
What Seattle does not publish: dispatcher-unit audio recordings, full incident narratives, names of involved parties (correctly), and certain investigative records. The omissions are mostly consistent with state public-records law rather than deliberate choices by the City.
The quality is unusual. The data is published in stable formats, schemas change rarely and with notice, and the City staff who maintain the portal are responsive to civic-tech inquiries. None of these things are automatic — many cities publish data that nominally exists but is unmaintained, inconsistently formatted, or quietly deprecated.
King County: the regional layer
King County publishes its own data portal (data.kingcounty.gov) covering the unincorporated areas and providing some county-wide aggregates. The most useful King County public-safety datasets include:
- King County Sheriff's Office data — covering KCSO-served jurisdictions (the unincorporated county and contracted cities).
- King County EMS — reports on the regional Medic One/EMS system, of which Seattle's paramedic program is a part.
- Building permits and fire code violations — county-wide aggregations for understanding the fire-risk environment.
King County's public-safety data is generally less granular and less timely than Seattle's real-time fire feed.
Bellevue: small but well-curated
The City of Bellevue maintains a smaller open-data portal but the public-safety entries are notably clean. Bellevue Police also runs a transparency website focused on department data.
Bellevue's call volume is much lower than Seattle's, which means the data is easier to query and visualize but less interesting for trend analysis. Bellevue is also a much wealthier and lower-density city, which produces a public-safety profile dominated by medical aid and motor-vehicle calls.
As in most cities, investigative records are not part of what Bellevue publishes.
Tacoma: improving but uneven
Tacoma's open-data portal has expanded considerably in the past few years. Its public-safety offerings are worth checking directly, since coverage and documentation vary from dataset to dataset. Expect to put in more effort than with Seattle's well-documented feeds.
Portland: the Oregon comparison
Across the Columbia, the Portland Police Bureau publishes police dispatched-calls data through its open-data page, including an interactive dashboard. It is a useful point of comparison with SPD's call data, though category names and geographic units differ, so direct comparisons take care.
What is conspicuously absent
Cataloging what these jurisdictions publish is only half the story. A few things are conspicuously absent from all of them:
- Real-time police dispatch data. In this region, police call data is published only after calls are cleared, and with a lag. The decision is partly about investigation integrity and partly about officer safety, but the cumulative effect is that the public cannot watch police activity unfold the way it can watch fire activity unfold.
- 911 caller identities, even pseudonymized. Correctly omitted, but it means analyses of "who calls 911 about what" require entirely different data sources (surveys, mostly).
- Fire response times. Seattle's fire dataset records when a call was dispatched but not when units arrived, so fire response-time analysis depends on internal reports. (SPD's Call Data, by contrast, does include dispatch-delay and response-time fields.)
- Mental health response data, separated from police data. Some calls that go to police are functionally mental-health calls. The data does not generally separate these, although SPD's Call Data now includes fields for responses by Seattle's CARE Department and co-response teams.
- Fire investigation outcomes. A structure fire generates a dispatch record but the eventual cause-of-fire determination, which often takes weeks of arson-investigation work, is not always linked back to the dispatch record in a queryable way.
These gaps shape what civic-tech projects can build and what they can't. A real-time citywide fire map is possible (this site is one). A real-time police map is not. An analysis of fire response times by neighborhood is hard to construct. An analysis of mental-health 911 demand requires combining multiple datasets across multiple agencies.
How projects use this data
The public-safety open-data ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest supports a steady stream of civic-tech projects beyond live maps:
- Analytical journalism. Local newsrooms — Crosscut, the Seattle Times data team, KUOW — use the data for long-form analyses of trends like response-time disparities, false-alarm patterns, and traffic-incident geography.
- Academic research. University of Washington researchers in public policy, public health, and computer science use the data for studies on cardiac arrest survival (Medic 1's outcomes are world-leading and the data behind them is publicly inspectable), traffic safety, and predictive deployment.
- Equity audits. Civil-society organizations use SPD's data to audit how police activity is distributed across the city and how disposition rates vary by neighborhood. This is one of the more politically charged uses of the data and Seattle's commitment to publishing it has held under significant pressure.
- Real estate and insurance. Less commonly discussed, but worth knowing: insurance underwriters and large real estate brokerages do consume public-safety data for risk modeling. The data is public and they are allowed to use it.
- Resident-facing tools. Dashboards, neighborhood newsletters, mapping projects — including this one — that turn the raw feeds into something residents can read at a glance.
The fragility of the system
Public-safety open data depends on a chain of decisions, any of which can be reversed. Mayors change. Council priorities shift. Police chiefs differ in their views on transparency. Federal pressure around investigative data can lead to release rollbacks. The current state — Seattle as one of the leading public-safety data publishers in the country — is the product of multiple years of cumulative pro-transparency decisions, and it is not guaranteed to persist.
The most important thing residents can do, if they value the existence of this kind of data, is use it. Open-data programs that demonstrate audience and downstream impact survive budget cycles. Programs that publish into the void do not. Every time a civic-tech project, a newsroom analysis, or a research paper cites Seattle Open Data, it helps justify the staff time spent maintaining the program. This is, modestly, one of the reasons we built Seattle Breaking.