Reading Seattle Police Department Call Types: A Civilian's Glossary
Published April 26, 2026 · 9 minute read
The Seattle Police Department generates roughly half a million calls for service a year. They show up on the Seattle Breaking live feed with terse descriptions like "DV — Disturbance, No Assault" or "Trespass — Premise Check" or "Suspicious Circumstance." If you have never worked in law enforcement those phrases can feel deliberately opaque. They aren't — they are a controlled vocabulary that SPD uses internally to classify calls quickly and to track outcomes for reporting. But the vocabulary is unfamiliar to most residents, and that means a lot of people draw the wrong conclusions from what they see on the map. This article is a quick decoder.
Clearance descriptions, not initial reports
The first thing to understand about the SPD Call Data feed — and therefore about the police pins on the Seattle Breaking map — is that the description you see is a "clearance description," not the initial call. When you call 911 and report what sounds like a fight in the apartment next door, the call-taker enters an initial description (often "DV — Possible Assault" or "Disturbance"). After an officer responds and assesses the situation, they assign a clearance code reflecting what they actually found.
The dataset publishes the clearance code, not the initial 911 description. This is why the same situation can produce different feed entries depending on what officers found on arrival. A "DV — No Assault" clearance means officers responded to a domestic-violence call but determined there was no physical assault. A "DV — Assault" clearance means there was. The 911 caller's report can be the same in both cases.
The delay you noticed
The second thing to understand is that SPD data is published with a lag of several hours, sometimes longer. This is because the clearance code is not assigned until after an officer's report is filed, reviewed, and pushed through SPD's reporting system. The Seattle Fire Department's feed, by contrast, is more or less live because their feed publishes at dispatch time, not at clearance time. So if you are watching the live feed in real time and wondering why police pins are sparse compared to fire pins, that is why.
Common SPD clearance categories
Disturbance family
The "Disturbance" family covers situations that called for police but did not rise to a specific crime category. "Disturbance — Loud Music" is exactly what it sounds like. "Disturbance — Verbal" is a verbal argument that did not involve physical violence. "Disturbance — Group" is multiple people gathered in a way that drew complaints. "DV — Disturbance, No Assault" is the version where the disturbance was between family or household members.
Disturbance clearances are common, often non-violent, and frequently resolve with no arrest. They are not, by themselves, indicators of a dangerous neighborhood. They are indicators that someone called the police.
Suspicious Circumstance / Suspicious Person / Suspicious Vehicle
This is the category that confuses readers the most. "Suspicious" in this context does not mean SPD found something suspicious. It means a member of the public called to report something they considered suspicious, and an officer responded to investigate. A vehicle parked too long, a person walking through a parking lot at an odd hour, a stranger ringing doorbells — all of these can generate a "Suspicious" clearance. The vast majority resolve as no criminal activity.
If you see a cluster of "Suspicious Person" clearances in your neighborhood, the most accurate read is "your neighbors are calling the police often" — not "your neighborhood has unusual criminal activity." The two can be related but they are not the same thing.
Trespass family
"Trespass — Premise Check" is the most common variant — a building owner or manager has asked SPD to check for unauthorized persons on a property they own. "Trespass — Disturbance" adds a disturbance element. "Trespass — Felony" indicates a clearer criminal element (often involving repeat offenders with prior trespass warnings). The premise-check variant is heavily concentrated in downtown commercial districts and is often a regular check rather than a response to an incident.
Theft family
"Theft — Shoplift" is a retail theft (shoplifting). "Theft — Other" is a property theft that doesn't fit a more specific category. "Theft — Auto" is a stolen vehicle (sometimes also coded as "Auto Theft"). "Theft — Bicycle" is a stolen bike. SPD has historically broken these out at fine granularity because the response patterns are different — a shoplifting in progress is treated very differently from a delayed auto theft report.
Burglary family
"Burglary — Residential" and "Burglary — Commercial" are unauthorized entries into a building with intent to commit a crime, almost always theft. "Burglary — Cold" is a delayed report (the burglary already happened, hours or days ago). Cold burglary reports are common in the dataset because they generate a clearance code but they don't reflect real-time activity on the street.
Assault family
"Assault — Other" is a non-domestic assault that did not result in serious injury. "Assault — DV" is a domestic-violence assault. "Assault — Aggravated" involves a deadly weapon, serious bodily harm, or another aggravating factor. SPD's clearance codes also distinguish "Assault — With Weapon" for cases involving a knife, firearm, or other weapon.
Robbery
"Robbery" is a theft involving force or the threat of force — explicitly different from burglary or theft. "Robbery — Strong-arm" is force without a weapon. "Robbery — Armed" is force with a weapon. Robbery is a relatively low-volume category in absolute terms but it generates a significant share of the highest-severity dispatches in the dataset.
Welfare Check
"Welfare Check" is a request for police to check on the wellbeing of a person who hasn't been heard from, who is acting unusually, or who someone is worried about. They often resolve with no incident. Welfare checks are not crime indicators and we treat them as a relatively low-severity category on the map.
Traffic family
Traffic clearance codes break out into "Collision — No Injury," "Collision — With Injury," "Collision — Hit and Run," "DUI," "Traffic — Other," and "Parking" enforcement actions. These appear in the police feed even when the Fire Department was also dispatched (because both agencies cleared the call separately). On our map we move many of these to the "Traffic" category to keep the Police category focused on non-traffic activity.
911 Hangup / 911 Investigation
"911 Hangup" is a call to 911 where the caller disconnected before speaking, or where only background noise was heard. SPD is required to investigate every one. The vast majority resolve as no incident — accidental dial, pocket dial, child playing with a phone. These appear in the dataset but they are weak signal.
What we do with categorization on the map
For the Seattle Breaking map we apply a simplified categorization on top of SPD's clearance codes. Anything related to traffic — collisions, DUIs, parking enforcement — gets moved to the "Traffic" category. Everything else that came in from the SPD feed gets the "Police" category. We do not currently subdivide police events further on the map because the SPD data is delayed and we want the user experience to emphasize the freshest signal (fire) over the most granular (police).
If you want SPD data at finer granularity than our map provides, the raw dataset is available at data.seattle.gov. The SPD Open Data team also publishes monthly summary reports broken out by precinct.
What the codes don't tell you
A few important caveats:
- Clearance does not equal closure. A "clearance" is the close-out of a specific call for service. It is not the same as a criminal case being closed or a suspect being arrested.
- The same incident can generate multiple records. A complex incident — say, a robbery with foot pursuit and a foot-chase collision — can generate one record for the robbery, one for the collision, and one for any related auto theft. They will appear at different addresses with different timestamps.
- Officers exercise discretion. Whether a verbal argument becomes a "Disturbance — Verbal" clearance or a "Suspicious Circumstance" or no record at all depends partly on the officer. The same situation, encountered a second time, may be coded differently.
- Volume is not severity. A handful of high-severity events do far more harm than thousands of low-severity calls combined. Counting pins on the map will not tell you which neighborhoods have the most serious public-safety issues. It will tell you which neighborhoods generate the most calls.
The SPD vocabulary is much shorter than it looks at first. With the categories above you can read 95 percent of what shows up on the live feed. The rest is regional dialect — and once you've watched the feed for a week or two, you'll pick it up.