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Real-time fire, medical, traffic and police dispatch activity on First Hill, the hill just east of downtown known as "Pill Hill" for Harborview, Swedish and Virginia Mason, and home to Seattle University. The feed below is filtered to First Hill from the citywide dispatch stream and refreshes every thirty seconds.
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First Hill rises immediately east of downtown, bounded by Interstate 5 on the west, East Pike and East Madison streets on the north and Yesler Way on the south. Its eastern edge depends on whom you ask: some sources use Broadway and Boren Avenue, others 12th Avenue. In the 1890s it was where wealthy Seattle families built homes close to downtown but above it. The first King County Courthouse stood on the hill from 1890 until the county moved it in 1916, and the steep climb to reach it gave the area an old nickname, "Profanity Hill."
Today's nickname is "Pill Hill." Three major medical centers are here. Harborview Medical Center, at 325 Ninth Ave., is owned by King County and run by UW Medicine; it is Washington's only Level I trauma center for both adults and children, serves patients from Alaska, Idaho and Montana as well, and was instrumental in founding Seattle's Medic One paramedic program. Swedish Medical Center's First Hill campus and Virginia Mason Medical Center are a few blocks away. Seattle University, a Jesuit school, has been on the hill since 1891, and the Frye Art Museum, built around the collection of meatpacker Charles Frye, sits on Terry Avenue. Dense apartment and condominium towers fill much of the rest.
The First Hill Streetcar has run along Broadway and South Jackson Street since January 2016, linking Capitol Hill and International District/Chinatown light rail stations. A First Hill light rail station was planned but cancelled before University Link was built because of geotechnical risk.
SPD dispatched 11,092 events to First Hill over the year, about 30 a day, ranking it sixth of the city's 58 SPD neighborhood areas and placing it just behind Queen Anne. Seattle Fire recorded 4,806 incidents within the area shown on this page's map, about 13 a day. The hospitals and university bring large numbers of staff, students, patients and visitors to the hill each day, on top of a dense residential population, and the call totals reflect that. Our article on neighborhood dispatch patterns explains why volume tracks people.
First Hill keeps business hours. Its police events peak in the noon hour, 588, the only one of the six neighborhoods in this group to peak in the noon hour, and stay between about 500 and 590 an hour from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fire incidents peak at 11 a.m., and 43.4 percent come between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., against 41.8 percent citywide.
The police mix leans toward calls about people in distress. Crisis complaints are 7.1 percent of First Hill's dispatches, against 5.0 percent citywide, and assist-public calls 9.5 percent against 8.3. Prowler (5.6 vs 3.9 percent) and assault calls (5.3 vs 3.7) are also above the city's shares, while theft is well below (3.4 vs 5.2) and so is traffic (13.2 vs 16.4). Priority 1 events are 15.6 percent of the total, against 13.8 percent citywide. On the fire side, Medic Responses, the paramedic calls for the most serious medical emergencies, are 11.5 percent of incidents against 10.5 percent citywide. Automatic fire alarms (8.3 vs 6.2 percent), elevator rescues (3.0 vs 1.9) and alarm bells (1.8 vs 1.0) are all over-represented, which is what you would expect on a hill of hospitals, towers and campus buildings.
A caution about the hospitals: Seattle Fire records an incident where the emergency happens, not where the patient is taken. A trauma patient flown or driven to Harborview from elsewhere in the region does not count as a First Hill incident. What the hospitals add to the feed is calls from inside and around large buildings: alarms, elevator problems, medical calls in lobbies and on sidewalks, and transfer-type records such as "Trans to AMR," a label naming the private ambulance company AMR, of which 77 of the city's 672 fell in this map area. Expect weekday daytime to be busiest, with crisis and welfare calls mixed in among the medical calls, and a quieter residential night.
First Hill has no numbered fire station of its own, but it has the Medic One base: Medic 1, Medic 10 and the Battalion 3 EMS chief work out of Harborview at 325 Ninth Ave. The nearest stations are Station 25 on Capitol Hill, at 1300 E. Pine St. (Engine 25, Ladder 10, Aid 25), and Station 10 in the International District, at 400 S. Washington St. (Engine 10, Ladder 1, Aid 5, Aid 10). Which engine arrives depends on which unit is closest and available at that moment, as our guide to Seattle Fire coverage explains.
First Hill is in SPD's East Precinct. The call data splits its events almost evenly between the precinct's E (Edward) sector, 5,767, and G (George) sector, 5,325. Officers reached 63.0 percent of Priority 1 events with a recorded time within 7 minutes, slightly below the East Precinct's 64.8 percent but well above the 50.5 percent citywide; 78.8 percent were reached within 10 minutes. Our response-time analysis shows how the precincts compare.
The map box runs from I-5 east to about 12th Avenue and from around Yesler Way north to Pike Street, so it includes Harborview, the Swedish and Virginia Mason campuses and the western edge of Seattle University. Fire records appear within minutes; SPD's dataset is refreshed about once a day, so police pins lag. 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 "FIRST HILL"; 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.