← All recaps

Seattle Breaking — Saturday, May 17, 2025

Daily recap · 309 dispatches

Seattle's fire, medical, traffic, and police agencies cleared 309 dispatches across the city on Saturday, May 17, 2025, according to the Seattle Open Data feeds published by the Seattle Fire Department and the Seattle Police Department. The day's activity was led by 214 medical-aid responses, 10 traffic-related dispatches, and 28 fire-category calls, with 0 police clearances and 0 hazardous-materials dispatches rounding out the picture.

The busiest hour citywide was 00:00–01:00 local time, with 20 dispatches in that single hour. Among higher-severity incidents — structure fires, working fires, shootings, stabbings, robberies, and serious assaults — the feeds recorded 0 events, listed below. As elsewhere on this site, these counts reflect what agencies published rather than what was reported to 911, and the police data in particular publishes only after each call is cleared and may continue to settle as more clearances post.

Notable incidents

No incidents on this day were flagged as high-severity by our scoring. A quiet day on the high-severity side does not mean a quiet day overall — most dispatch activity is low-severity aid and traffic calls. See the breakdowns below for the day's full picture.

By category

CategoryDispatches
Fire28
Medical214
Traffic10
Rescue5
Other52
Total309

By hour of day

All hours are in Pacific time. Bars are scaled to the day's busiest hour.

0020
0115
028
039
049
056
0610
0713
0811
099
1010
1114
1216
1313
1412
1513
1615
1714
1814
1913
2017
2111
2217
2320

By neighborhood

Dispatches inside the bounding boxes used by our neighborhood feeds, plus a count for everywhere else in the city. Smaller neighborhoods produce smaller counts; this is a function of population and land use, not a measure of safety. For the longer reasoning, see neighborhood dispatch patterns.

AreaDispatches
South Lake Union5
Fremont2
Belltown17
Elsewhere in Seattle285

Map of the day's dispatches

309 of the day's dispatches had usable coordinates. Pin colors match the category legend used elsewhere on the site.

About this recap

This page summarizes 309 dispatch records published by the Seattle Fire Department and the Seattle Police Department through the Seattle Open Data portal for Saturday, May 17, 2025. Fire records publish within minutes of dispatch; police records publish only after the responding officer files a clearance code, which typically lags the actual event by several hours, so on very recent days a police count may climb as more clearances post. "Notable" is a simple severity flag based on call-type strings (structure fires, working fires, shootings, stabbings, robberies, assaults, hazmat). Counts are exact for what the feeds published; the category mapping into fire / medical / traffic / police / hazmat is our own and documented on the How It Works page.

← May 16, 2025  ·  All recaps  ·  May 18, 2025 →

Get this in your inbox

Subscribe to the Seattle Breaking daily recap — a short morning email summarizing the previous day's notable dispatches, totals by category, and per-neighborhood breakdowns. Sent each morning around 7 AM Pacific. No tracking pixels, no spam, unsubscribe anytime.