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Real-time fire, medical, traffic and police dispatch activity in Ballard — the former independent city on Salmon Bay, now a dense mix of apartments, Market Street shops, Ballard Avenue restaurants and a working waterfront. The feed is filtered to Ballard from the citywide dispatch stream and refreshes every thirty seconds.
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Ballard sits on the north shore of Salmon Bay at the western end of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, bounded loosely by Shilshole Bay on the west, Crown Hill on the north, Greenwood and Phinney Ridge on the east and the ship canal and Salmon Bay on the south. Its eastern neighbor is Fremont. Ballard was its own city for nearly two decades — residents voted to incorporate in 1889 — before water and sewer problems pushed it to join Seattle on May 29, 1907.
The neighborhood grew up around fishing and the waterfront, and it remains the traditional center of Seattle's Scandinavian community, visible today in the National Nordic Museum and the Norwegian Constitution Day parade every May 17. The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, where boats pass between Salmon Bay and Puget Sound, are a major landmark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Golden Gardens Park and the Shilshole Bay Marina sit along the shoreline to the northwest.
Commercial Ballard runs along NW Market Street and historic Ballard Avenue NW, a district of brick storefronts between Market Street and NW Dock Place listed on the National Register in 1976 and now dense with restaurants and bars. Since the mid-2000s, city planning has steered a great deal of apartment construction into the blocks around that core. 15th Avenue NW is the main north–south arterial: it carries the RapidRide D Line, in service since 2012, and crosses the ship canal on the Ballard Bridge, a drawbridge that carried about 45,000 vehicles a day in 2023.
SPD splits Ballard into two neighborhood areas. Ballard South, the larger of the two, logged 8,663 dispatched events over the twelve months and ranks 9th of 58; Ballard North logged 4,168 and ranks 23rd. Together that is 12,831 events, 5.17% of the citywide total, or about 35 a day. As in any busy commercial neighborhood, volume reflects the number of people living, working and shopping there more than it reflects risk; see our explainer on neighborhood dispatch patterns.
The surprising part is the clock. For a neighborhood known for its bar scene, Ballard's police calls are strongly daytime: the busiest hour is the 11 a.m. hour, and only 12.4% of events fall between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. — the lowest late-night share of the eleven neighborhoods we profile. Calls build quickly from 7 a.m., stay high through the afternoon, and taper through the evening.
That daytime tilt fits the call mix. Theft is the most distinctive category, 7.4% of dispatched events versus 5.2% citywide, which is consistent with a large retail presence along Market Street and 15th Avenue NW. Traffic (18.2% vs 16.4%) and suspicious-circumstance reports (16.7% vs 14.5%) are also somewhat above average, while crisis complaints and domestic disturbances are a smaller share than they are citywide. Ballard also carries fewer of the most urgent calls: 10.7% of its events were Priority 1, against 13.8% citywide.
Seattle Fire recorded 4,188 incidents within the area shown on this page's map, about 11 a day. Because the map box is generous, this includes some of the surrounding residential blocks. The fire mix is notably residential. Commercial automatic fire alarms are only 3.4% of incidents here, about half their citywide share, while activated carbon-monoxide detectors (1.8% vs 0.8%) are more common. Small outdoor fires also show up more often than average: rubbish fires at 2.8% against 1.5%, dumpster fires at 1.4% against 0.4%, and illegal burns at 3.8% against 2.6%. The data records what was reported, not the cause.
| Seattle Fire incident type | Incidents | Share here | Share citywide |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aid Response | 2,026 | 48.4% | 49.8% |
| Medic Response | 407 | 9.7% | 10.5% |
| Aid Response Yellow | 212 | 5.1% | 4.4% |
| Illegal Burn | 158 | 3.8% | 2.6% |
| Auto Fire Alarm | 142 | 3.4% | 6.2% |
| Rubbish Fire | 117 | 2.8% | 1.5% |
On a typical weekday the feed is dominated by traffic and retail-related police calls along 15th Avenue NW and Market Street, along with medical-aid responses across the neighborhood's large stock of apartments. 15th Avenue NW is one of the north end's heaviest arterials, and the approach to the Ballard Bridge backs up whenever the span opens for marine traffic, so collision and traffic-hazard reports cluster there. Evenings bring a smaller wave of disturbance calls around Ballard Avenue's bars and restaurants, but the data shows it is not the dominant pattern.
The working waterfront is the other thread. Salmon Bay's industrial and maritime businesses, the Locks and the shoreline parks to the northwest bring the occasional boat, water-rescue or beach call that most inland neighborhoods never see. Summer weekends bring crowds to Golden Gardens and the Locks, which can add visitor medical calls to the mix.
Ballard's fire station is Station 18 at 1521 NW Market Street, which houses Engine 18, Ladder 8, Medic 18 and the Battalion 4 chief, so the neighborhood has a paramedic unit on its own main street. Nearby help comes from Station 35 in Crown Hill (Engine 35) to the north and Station 9 in Fremont (Engine 9) to the east; under the closest-available-unit model, a Ballard call can draw any of them. Our article on Seattle Fire coverage explains how that works.
Police service comes from SPD's North Precinct. In the data, Ballard's events fall mainly in the Boy sector, with a smaller share in John sector. Officers were on scene within seven minutes for 33.0% of Ballard's Priority 1 calls and within ten minutes for 50.8%, below both the North Precinct (38.4% within seven) and the city (50.5%). Our response-time analysis shows that the North Precinct as a whole runs slowest on this measure.
Each pin above is one dispatch record with usable coordinates inside the Ballard map area; click a pin or a feed entry to highlight it. Seattle Fire records appear within a few minutes of dispatch. Police records arrive much later, because the city refreshes the SPD dataset about once a day, so police pins describe earlier events rather than what is happening now. An empty feed only means nothing in the current citywide window fell inside this area.
About the data. Police figures come from the Seattle Police Department's Call Data (data.seattle.gov dataset 33kz-ixgy), October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026. The raw file has one row per responding unit; we count distinct CAD events, and only dispatched (community-generated) events, not officer on-view activity. Neighborhood assignment uses SPD's own neighborhood label ("Ballard South" and "Ballard North", combined), which does not exactly match the area on this page's map. Response-time shares use Priority 1 events with a recorded time from call queued to first officer on scene. Fire figures come from Seattle Fire Real-Time 911 (dataset kzjm-xkqj) for the same twelve months, counted inside this page's map bounding box. Call types describe what was reported at dispatch, not what responders found.