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How Fast Do Seattle Police Respond? A Year of 911 Data by Precinct

Published October 13, 2026 · 9 minute read

When someone in Seattle calls 911 about a shooting, a robbery in progress or an assault, how long does it take a police officer to arrive? We looked at a full year of Seattle Police Department dispatch records, October 2025 through September 2026, and the citywide answer is close to the department's own target: for the most urgent calls, half of all events had a first officer on scene within about 7 minutes of the call being queued for dispatch.

The citywide figure hides a wide gap between neighborhoods. In the East Precinct, which covers Capitol Hill, First Hill and the Central District, about 65 percent of top-priority events had an officer on scene within 7 minutes. In the North Precinct, the busiest precinct in the city, the figure was about 38 percent. Where you live in Seattle measurably changes how long you are likely to wait.

What "Priority 1" means

Every call that reaches Seattle's 911 center is assigned a priority based on how much risk the situation poses. Seattle's 911 center is now part of the city's Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Department, and its public guide to calling 911 describes the police tiers this way:

• Priority 1: critical incidents that pose an immediate threat to human life or involve significant bodily harm. The guide gives shootings, robberies and assaults as examples.
• Priority 2: active incidents that could escalate, and crimes where catching a suspect or taking enforcement action is still possible. Shoplifting and property damage are the guide's examples.
• Priority 3: incidents that don't meet the first two tiers but may still need an officer to investigate or act.
• Priority 4: non-critical service requests, such as found property or parking complaints.

The dataset also contains a Priority 5 code and a small number of other values; we don't analyze response times for those here. Of the 248,389 community-generated events SPD dispatched during the year, 34,351 (13.8 percent) were Priority 1, 96,785 (39.0 percent) were Priority 2 and 61,768 (24.9 percent) were Priority 3. Our companion piece, What Seattle Police Are Actually Called For, breaks down the whole mix.

The city's guide also explains why lower-priority callers sometimes wait a long time: during busy periods such as Friday and Saturday nights, officers are pulled off lower-priority work to handle Priority 1 calls. Priority 1 calls get answered first, and the other tiers wait in line behind them.

How response time is measured here

The SPD Call Data dataset records, for each event, the number of seconds from the moment the call is queued for dispatch to the moment the first officer reports arriving on scene. That is the number we use. It is not the whole wait a caller experiences. The time spent talking to the 911 call-taker before the call is entered and queued isn't included. The city says around 90 percent of 911 calls are answered within 15 seconds, but the conversation that follows can take a minute or more. A 2016 City Council analysis made the same point about how Seattle has long measured response times.

Two more definitions matter. We count distinct events, not rows. The raw dataset has one row per responding unit, so a robbery that draws six patrol cars appears six times; we collapse those to one event and use the first arrival. And we only use events the 911 center dispatched in response to a community call. Officer "on-view" incidents, where an officer comes across something and logs it, have no wait and are excluded.

The citywide picture: about 7 minutes at the middle

SPD's stated goal, as reported by KOMO News in 2021, is an average Priority 1 response of 7 minutes. Over the past year, 50.5 percent of Priority 1 events had a first officer on scene within 7 minutes, which puts the median response, the point where half are faster and half slower, right around 7 minutes. Beyond that:

• 13.3 percent had an officer there within 3 minutes, and 32.8 percent within 5 minutes.
• 70.1 percent were reached within 10 minutes and 86.7 percent within 15 minutes.
• About 13 percent of Priority 1 events, roughly 4,225 over the year, waited more than 15 minutes for the first officer, and about 2.6 percent waited more than half an hour.

We report shares within a time threshold rather than an average on purpose. Response-time data has a long tail: about 324 Priority 1 events show waits of more than an hour. Some of those may reflect an officer marking "arrived" late, or a call that changed character after it was queued, rather than a real hour-long wait. A few extreme values can drag an average far from what a typical caller experiences. Because the long waits all sit on the slow side, an average computed from this data would likely come out above the 7-minute median.

The precinct gap

SPD divides Seattle into five patrol precincts. The table below shows, for each one, the share of Priority 1 events reached within 5, 7, 10 and 15 minutes.

*Citywide includes events with no precinct recorded. "P1 events timed" counts Priority 1 events with a recorded response time.

The ranking holds at every threshold up to 15 minutes. East and West reach Priority 1 events fastest, South is in the middle, and Southwest and North trail. Interpolating between thresholds, the typical (median) Priority 1 wait is roughly 5½ minutes in the East Precinct and about 6 in the West, compared with about 7½ in the South, 8 in the Southwest and 8½ in the North. These estimates are approximate because the data is grouped into time bands.

The gap shrinks as the clock runs. By 15 minutes every precinct has reached more than 80 percent of its Priority 1 events, and by 30 minutes all five are at about 97 percent. The difference between precincts is mostly in the first ten minutes, which are the minutes that matter most when someone is hurt.

Why geography matters

The East and West precincts are compact and dense. West covers downtown, Belltown, South Lake Union, Queen Anne and Magnolia; East covers Capitol Hill, First Hill and the Central District. A patrol car in those areas is rarely far from anywhere else in the precinct. The North Precinct covers most of the city north of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, from Ballard and Fremont to Lake City and the city limit at 145th Street. The City's 2015 Comprehensive Plan draft environmental impact statement noted that the North and Southwest precincts "have the largest geographic area to cover" and congested arterials that may contribute to longer response times. That review also found that, over the preceding five years, only the East and West precincts had consistently met the 7-minute goal. A decade later, the same two precincts are still the fastest.

North is also the busiest precinct. It generated 76,439 dispatched events last year, 30.8 percent of the city's total and more than any other precinct, along with 8,963 timed Priority 1 events, about 25 a day. A large territory combined with the most calls means an officer is more likely to be tied up on another call, or driving across the precinct, when the next emergency comes in.

Southwest is the opposite case: the fewest events of any precinct (23,632) but the second-slowest Priority 1 numbers. West Seattle is connected to the rest of the city by a few bridges, and the precinct covers a large, hilly area. Low call volume doesn't make up for distance.

Staffing is the other half of the equation: how many officers are actually on patrol in a precinct at a given hour. This dataset doesn't include staffing levels, so we can't measure how much of the gap they explain. Anyone comparing precincts should keep in mind that geography and volume are what the data shows, not the whole story.

Priority 2 and 3: a different scale of wait

Below Priority 1, response times are measured in tens of minutes, not single minutes.

Citywide, 51.8 percent of Priority 2 events had an officer on scene within 30 minutes, which puts the Priority 2 median at roughly half an hour. 20.4 percent were reached within 10 minutes, and 31.2 percent took longer than an hour. For Priority 3, only 42.0 percent had an officer arrive within an hour, so most Priority 3 events that got an officer at all waited more than an hour.

The precinct ranking flips for lower-priority calls. South and Southwest, which are slower than average on Priority 1, have the best Priority 2 and Priority 3 numbers: about 59 percent of Southwest Priority 2 events were reached within 30 minutes, against 48 percent in the West. One plausible reading is that lower-volume precincts have more slack once emergencies are handled, while in the busy West and North precincts, Priority 2 calls keep getting pushed back by new Priority 1 calls. The data is consistent with that, but it doesn't prove it.

What this means if you call 911

• Describe the danger clearly. Priority depends on what the call-taker hears. A weapon, an injury, or someone being hurt right now is what puts a call in Priority 1.
• For lower-priority problems, plan for a wait. A car prowl discovered in the morning, or a noise complaint, may take an hour or more to get an officer, especially on a weekend night. Seattle's non-emergency line is 206-625-5011.
• Neighborhood matters less than priority. A Priority 1 call in the North Precinct is still answered far faster than a Priority 2 call anywhere in the city.

For more on what happens between dialing and dispatch, see How Seattle's 911 Dispatch System Actually Works. For the codes you'll see on our live feed, see Reading Seattle Police Department Call Types. And for why some neighborhoods produce more calls in the first place, see Why Some Seattle Neighborhoods Generate More Dispatch Traffic.

What this data can't tell you

• Not every event has a response time. 31,841 of 34,351 Priority 1 events (92.7 percent) have a recorded first-arrival time. The rest can include calls that were cancelled, handled without an officer arriving, or where no arrival was logged. If those missing events are systematically faster or slower, the shares shift.
• Each event carries one priority code. Calls can be upgraded or downgraded as new information comes in, and the dataset doesn't show that history.
• Arrival times are entered by officers. An officer who forgets to mark "on scene" until the situation is under control will make a response look slower than it was; the reverse can also happen.
• Precinct is where the event happened, not where the officer came from. Officers sometimes cross precinct lines to cover a call.
• Time-band data. We have counts at fixed thresholds (3, 5, 7, 10, 15, 30 and 60 minutes), not individual times, so the precinct medians above are estimates.

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