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Real-time fire, medical, traffic and police dispatch activity in the University District — the dense, student-heavy neighborhood around the University of Washington, from The Ave to the light rail station at Brooklyn and 45th. The feed is filtered to the U District from the citywide dispatch stream and refreshes every thirty seconds.
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The University District takes its name from the University of Washington, which moved to its present campus east of 15th Avenue NE in 1895. In common usage the neighborhood runs from Interstate 5 on the west to University Village and the Union Bay Natural Area on the east, and from Portage Bay and the Lake Washington Ship Canal north to NE Ravenna Boulevard. About 23,000 people lived there in 2023, a large share of them students.
Its commercial spine is University Way NE, universally called "The Ave" — a name chosen in a 1919 contest to replace 14th Avenue. The Ave is a long strip of inexpensive restaurants, bookstores and late-hours food, busy well past midnight during the school year. A few blocks east, fraternity and sorority houses line 17th Avenue NE and nearby streets, roughly between NE 45th and NE 50th, a cluster known since the late 1930s as Greek Row. The U District Farmers Market, founded in 1993, was one of the first in the city.
The neighborhood is changing quickly in height. A 2017 rezone allows buildings up to 320 feet between I-5 and 15th Avenue NE (The Ave itself was left out), and several residential towers, mostly aimed at students, have gone up since. The U District light rail station on Brooklyn Avenue near NE 45th Street opened in October 2021 with the Northgate Link extension, putting the core of the neighborhood one stop from the UW station by Husky Stadium and a few minutes from Northgate.
Police were dispatched to 10,301 community-generated events in the area SPD labels "University" over the twelve months ending September 2026, seventh-highest of the city's 58 SPD neighborhood areas. That is a big number for a mostly residential district, but it is in line with how many people live, study and eat there. Dispatch volume follows people, foot traffic and late-night activity more than it follows danger, a point we develop in our piece on neighborhood dispatch patterns.
What sets the U District apart is when calls come in. It is the only one of the eleven neighborhoods we profile whose busiest police hour is the 11 p.m. hour, and 18.8% of its dispatched events fall between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. — the highest late-night share in that group, ahead of Capitol Hill. Police activity bottoms out around 4 a.m., then rises and holds at a fairly even level through the day and evening, without the afternoon peak seen in commercial districts. Fire and medical incidents follow a more conventional curve, peaking in the 1 p.m. hour.
The mix of calls matches the timing. Disturbance reports — noise, arguments, parties, people causing a scene — make up 22.5% of dispatched events here against 14.9% citywide, the largest gap in the neighborhood's top ten. Theft (3.5% vs 5.2%) and crisis complaints (3.5% vs 5.0%) are a smaller share than the city average. Labels describe what the caller reported, not what officers found.
On the fire side, 4,429 incidents were recorded within the area shown on this page's map, about 12 a day. Automatic fire alarms stand out: 11.8% of incidents here versus 6.2% citywide, which is what you would expect where residence halls, laboratories, campus buildings and new high-rises all carry monitored alarm systems. Paramedic-level "Medic Response" calls are a smaller share than the city's (7.3% vs 10.5%); a younger population is one plausible reason, but the dataset does not record patient ages, so we can't confirm it.
| Seattle Fire incident type | Incidents | Share here | Share citywide |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aid Response | 2,126 | 48.0% | 49.8% |
| Auto Fire Alarm | 522 | 11.8% | 6.2% |
| Medic Response | 325 | 7.3% | 10.5% |
| Illegal Burn | 131 | 3.0% | 2.6% |
| Rescue Elevator | 103 | 2.3% | 1.9% |
| Aid Response Yellow | 99 | 2.2% | 4.4% |
One important caveat: the University of Washington runs its own police department, and calls that UW Police handle on campus are not part of SPD's dataset. The police numbers here therefore describe SPD's workload, not every police call in the district.
Expect the feed to be busiest in the evening and late at night, especially on weekends while classes are in session. The Ave and the blocks around it generate disturbance and noise complaints, welfare checks and medical-aid calls for people who are intoxicated or unwell, and Greek Row adds party and noise reports on weekend nights. During the day the pattern shifts toward automatic alarm activations in large buildings, elevator rescues in the newer towers, and routine medical calls.
Traffic is the other steady contributor. NE 45th and NE 50th Streets carry heavy east–west traffic to and from I-5, and the freeway ramps on the neighborhood's west edge are a reliable source of collision dispatches. Large events on campus also show up: Seattle Fire's "Special Event" label appears here at about twice its citywide share, reflecting the standby crews assigned when big crowds gather.
The neighborhood's own fire station is Station 17 at 1050 NE 50th Street, home to Engine 17, Ladder 9, Medic 17 and the Battalion 6 chief, so the neighborhood has a paramedic unit based inside it. Neighboring stations include Station 16 at Green Lake and Station 22 in Montlake, and because Seattle Fire sends the closest available unit, any of them may turn up on a U District call. Our guide to how Seattle Fire coverage works explains the routing.
For police, every University event in the data is assigned to SPD's North Precinct, Union sector. Officers reached 36.2% of the area's Priority 1 calls within seven minutes and 56.5% within ten. That trails the North Precinct's 38.4% and the city's 50.5%. Our article on police response times explains why the North Precinct, which covers most of the city north of the ship canal, runs slower than the dense central precincts.
Each pin above is one dispatch record with usable coordinates inside the University District 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. Incidents on the UW campus handled only by UW Police will not appear. 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 ("University"), 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.