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What Seattle Police Are Actually Called For: 346,000 Events in One Year

Published October 13, 2026 · 7 minute read

Seattle police logged 346,271 distinct events between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026, about 949 a day. Most were not the violent emergencies that dominate news coverage. The three biggest categories of calls from the public were traffic problems, disturbances and suspicious circumstances, which together made up 45.7 percent of everything the 911 center sent officers to. Assaults, robberies and rapes combined were 4.4 percent. Calls about people in a behavioral or mental-health crisis outnumbered assault calls.

This is a breakdown of a full year of Seattle Police Department dispatch data: who generated the calls, what they were about, how urgent they were, and where they came from.

Who starts a police event

Police events in Seattle begin in one of two ways. Either someone contacts the 911 center and a call-taker creates an event that a dispatcher sends officers to, or an officer encounters something while on patrol (a traffic stop, a fight on the sidewalk) and logs it directly. The second kind is called an "on-view" event.

Of the 346,271 events in the year, 248,389 (71.7 percent) were dispatched in response to a call from the public and 97,882 (28.3 percent) were officer on-view. Roughly seven in ten police events start with a resident, business or other agency asking for help, and three in ten start with an officer.

The dataset also labels how each contact came in. That label is attached to rows rather than events, and the raw data has one row for each responding unit, so a call that draws five units counts five times. With that caveat, among the 467,010 rows tied to community calls, 68.6 percent came in through 911, 30.6 percent through other telephone lines (mainly the non-emergency number), 0.7 percent from alarm companies, and 0.1 percent by text message. If urgent 911 calls draw more units on average than non-emergency reports, which is plausible, these row shares overstate 911's share of events somewhat. Even allowing for that, a large share of police work is requested through the non-emergency line rather than 911.

What people call about

SPD groups its event types into broad categories. Here are the 15 largest for dispatched events, as a share of all 248,389 dispatched events.

Shares are of all 248,389 dispatched events. About 4,724 events (1.9 percent) fall in smaller groups outside the 30 largest.

Traffic leads at 40,642 events, 16.4 percent, or about 111 a day. The group includes collision reports and other traffic-related problems. A separate "Automobiles" group adds another 8,092.

Disturbance (37,082, 14.9 percent) and Suspicious Circumstances (35,897, 14.5 percent) are next. Both labels describe what the caller reported, not what officers found. A "suspicious person" call means someone thought a person looked out of place. It doesn't mean an officer confirmed anything was wrong. Our glossary of SPD call types explains how to read these labels on the live feed.

Assist Public (20,572) and Assist Other Agency (8,700) together account for 11.8 percent. These are requests for help or service rather than reports of a crime. Add Prowler (9,740), Premise Checks, Hazards and false alarms, and a large share of police work is checking on situations rather than responding to a reported crime.

Property crime is in the middle of the list. Theft is fifth at 12,932 events (5.2 percent), Burglary is 4,506 (1.8 percent), and Property Destruction is 3,244.

Crisis calls: more than assaults

The sixth-largest group is Crisis Complaint: 12,541 dispatched events, 5.0 percent of the total, or about 34 a day. These are generally calls about someone experiencing a behavioral or mental-health crisis. That is more than the 9,188 assault events and well above the 3,566 narcotics events in the same period.

That number is a floor, not a full count of behavioral-health calls. A person in crisis yelling in the street might be coded as a Disturbance; someone slumped in a doorway might come in as Assist Public or a welfare check; a confused person trying door handles might be a Prowler or Suspicious Circumstances call. The data records how the call was categorized, not what the person was going through.

Seattle has been building an alternative for some of these calls. The city's Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Department, created under Mayor Bruce Harrell, now also houses the 911 center. In October 2023 the city launched "dual dispatch", sending unarmed CARE behavioral-health responders alongside police to low-acuity calls such as "person down" and welfare checks. In June 2024 the mayor proposed expanding the program citywide. According to the CARE Department, its Community Crisis Responders handle 911 calls that do not require an armed officer: welfare checks, de-escalation, and connecting people to shelter, treatment and basic supplies. They can be dispatched by the 911 center or requested by SPD patrol officers.

The SPD dataset doesn't show which events also got a CARE responder, so we can't measure how many of these 12,541 crisis complaints were shared or handed off. What it does show is the scale. Crisis complaints alone were about 1 in 20 police dispatches, and the broader set of welfare, assist and disturbance calls where behavioral health may play a part is much larger.

Violent incidents are a small share of the volume

Among dispatched events, Assaults were 3.7 percent (9,188), Robbery 0.5 percent (1,180) and Rape 0.3 percent (659). Together that is 11,027 events, 4.4 percent of dispatches. Adding Domestic Disturbance/Violence (9,581), which includes verbal disputes as well as physical violence, brings the total to 8.3 percent.

A small share of the volume is not a small share of the harm. These calls are usually high priority and can tie up several officers at once. But the numbers explain something residents often notice on our live feed: most of what scrolls past is collisions, disturbances, welfare checks and suspicious-person reports, not violent crime. We made a similar point about fire and police calls together in The Ten Most Common 911 Call Types in Seattle.

How urgent are the calls?

Every dispatched event gets a priority. Under the city's definitions, Priority 1 is an immediate threat to life or serious bodily harm, Priority 2 is an active incident that could escalate, Priority 3 needs an officer but isn't urgent, and Priority 4 is a non-critical service request.

Priority 2 is by far the largest tier: 96,785 events, 39.0 percent. Priority 1 accounted for 34,351 (13.8 percent), about 94 a day citywide. Priorities 3, 4 and 5 together made up 47.2 percent. Priority drives the wait: in our analysis of SPD response times, half of Priority 1 events had an officer on scene within about 7 minutes, while the typical Priority 2 event waited about half an hour.

Where the calls come from

The North Precinct, which covers most of the city north of the Ship Canal, generated the most dispatched events, followed by the West Precinct, which takes in downtown.

North's lead reflects its size. The city's 2015 Comprehensive Plan environmental review listed North and Southwest as the precincts with the largest geographic areas, so a high call count in North is expected. The West Precinct's volume is more concentrated: downtown, Belltown, South Lake Union and Queen Anne pack a lot of activity into a small area. By SPD's neighborhood labels, the busiest areas for dispatched events were Capitol Hill (17,049), Downtown Commercial (13,108), Northgate (13,099), South Lake Union / Cascade (11,682), Queen Anne (11,495), First Hill (11,092). Capitol Hill alone, with 17,049 events, had about 72 percent as many dispatches as the entire Southwest Precinct. Our article on why some neighborhoods generate more dispatch traffic looks at the reasons, and our Belltown, South Lake Union and Fremont pages show local patterns.

What the data can't tell you

• Calls are not crimes. An event group reflects how the call was categorized, usually based on what the caller said. The category doesn't tell you whether a crime was confirmed.
• One category per event. A call that involves both a crisis and a disturbance appears under only one label.
• Calls handled without police aren't here. Medical and fire calls handled only by the Seattle Fire Department are in a separate dataset.
• On-view activity reflects police choices. Where officers patrol and what they stop to log shapes the on-view numbers, which is why we focus on community-dispatched events for categories and precincts.

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