Live Feed — Columbia City
Loading live feed…
Incident Map
Fire
Police
Medical
Traffic
Live scanner & dispatch traffic · 24/7
Real-time fire, medical, traffic and police dispatch activity in Columbia City, the Rainier Valley neighborhood built around a historic main street on Rainier Avenue South and a light rail station on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. The feed below is filtered to Columbia City from the citywide dispatch stream and refreshes every thirty seconds.
Loading live feed…
Columbia City sits in the Rainier Valley in Southeast Seattle, about four miles from downtown. It began as a townsite laid out by promoter J. K. Edmiston, who sold the first lots on April 4, 1891. The town incorporated in 1893 and voted in March 1907 to join Seattle, becoming part of the city that May. The old main street survives along Rainier Avenue South. Columbia City won city Landmark District status in 1978, which covers more than 40 historic commercial and residential buildings, including the 1905 Columbia Hotel at 4900 Rainier Ave. S. and a Carnegie library on the small green at the neighborhood's center.
The streetcar that once connected Columbia City to downtown is long gone, but King County Metro's Route 7 trolleybus still runs along Rainier Avenue. Since July 18, 2009, Columbia City station has served Link light rail from the median of Martin Luther King Jr. Way South between South Alaska and South Edmunds streets, a few blocks west of the business district, between Mount Baker and Othello stations on today's 1 Line. Outside the commercial blocks, Columbia City is mostly residential: single-family streets, newer apartment buildings near the station, and parks.
SPD dispatched 1,415 events to Columbia City over the year, about four a day, ranking it 45th of the city's 58 SPD neighborhood areas, just 0.6 percent of all dispatches. Part of that is geography: SPD's Columbia City area is small, and much of the surrounding Rainier Valley is counted under neighboring labels such as Mount Baker (5,132 events), Brighton/Dunlap (3,388) and Hillman City (931). Seattle Fire recorded 1,155 incidents within the area shown on this page's map, about three a day. Those are modest numbers for a neighborhood with a busy main street and a light rail station, and they show how much of the city's dispatch load is concentrated in the downtown core. See our article on neighborhood dispatch patterns for why.
This is a daytime neighborhood. Police events peak in the 2 p.m. hour, and only 16.7 percent fall between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., compared with 22 to 25 percent in Capitol Hill and Pioneer Square. The busiest hour had nearly six times the events of the quietest, the sharpest day-night swing of any neighborhood in this group. Fire incidents peak around 7 p.m. With only a few incidents in any given hour on any given day, the hour-by-hour shape is approximate.
Columbia City's mix looks like a residential neighborhood's. Traffic calls are 16.3 percent of dispatches, essentially the city's 16.4. Domestic disturbance and violence calls are a larger share than citywide, 6.3 percent against 3.9, as are automobile calls (4.5 vs 3.3 percent). Theft is a smaller share (3.5 vs 5.2). The counts behind these percentages are small (89 domestic calls, 63 automobile calls), so a few dozen events move them noticeably. The fire data points the same way. Medic Responses, the paramedic-level medical calls, are 14.1 percent of incidents here against 10.5 percent citywide, the highest share of the six neighborhoods in this group. Automatic medical alarms are 2.3 percent against 1.1, and residential fire alarms 1.8 percent against 1.2. Illegal burns are only 1.0 percent, against 2.6 citywide.
Most pins will be medical calls from homes and apartment buildings, collisions and traffic problems on Rainier Avenue South and Martin Luther King Jr. Way South, and a scattering of disturbance and suspicious-circumstance calls along the business district. Motor-vehicle incidents are 3.1 percent of fire calls here, above the city's 2.3 percent, which fits two busy arterials through a small area. Evenings on the restaurant strip add foot traffic, but the late-night spike that defines Capitol Hill or Pioneer Square is absent.
The nearest Seattle Fire stations are Station 28 in the Rainier Valley, at 5968 Rainier Ave. S. to the south, which houses Engine 28, Ladder 12 and Medic 28, and Station 30 in Mount Baker, at 2931 S. Mount Baker Blvd. to the north, which houses Engine 30. Medic 28 is the closest paramedic unit. Whichever appropriate unit is closest and free responds, so a call here can also draw crews from Beacon Hill or farther away on a busy day, as our guide to Seattle Fire coverage describes.
Columbia City is in SPD's South Precinct, and all 1,415 of its events are assigned to the precinct's R (Robert) sector. Response times here were slower than average: 42.5 percent of Priority 1 events with a recorded time had an officer on scene within 7 minutes, against 47.4 percent for the South Precinct and 50.5 percent citywide, though 70.4 percent were reached within 10 minutes. That figure rests on only 179 timed Priority 1 events, so each event moves it by more than half a percentage point; treat it as a rough indication. Our response-time analysis covers the precinct picture in detail.
The map box is centered on the business district and station and extends several blocks beyond them in each direction, so it does not match SPD's Columbia City area exactly. Fire and medical records appear within minutes; SPD data is refreshed about once a day, so police pins lag. Quiet stretches are normal here, and an empty feed simply means nothing has been dispatched inside the box in the current window.
About the data. Police figures come from SPD Call Data (data.seattle.gov, dataset 33kz-ixgy) for October 1, 2025 – September 30, 2026, counted as distinct dispatched (community-generated) CAD events, not per-unit rows, using SPD's own neighborhood label "COLUMBIA CITY"; officer on-view events are excluded. Response times run from the call being queued to the first officer on scene and cover Priority 1 events with a recorded time. Fire figures come from Seattle Fire Real-Time 911 (dataset kzjm-xkqj) for the same months, counted inside this page's map box, which approximates the neighborhood and does not match SPD's boundaries. Counts describe how calls were categorized at dispatch, not what responders found.