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Seattle Breaking is an independent, civic-data news project that surfaces real-time fire, medical, traffic, and police dispatch activity inside the City of Seattle. Every incident on this page comes from a publicly available dataset published by the Seattle Fire Department or the Seattle Police Department through the Seattle Open Data portal. We do not gather any new information — we organize and visualize what is already public, the moment it is published.
Use the live feed below to see what is happening across the city right now. Use the articles section to learn how to read what you're looking at — what a "Code 3 response" means, why some neighborhoods generate more dispatch traffic than others, what an "Aid-MVI" is, and what is and is not encrypted on Seattle's public-safety radio networks.
The live feed above pulls from two public datasets. The Seattle Real Time Fire 911 Calls dataset publishes every call accepted into the Seattle Fire Department's Computer-Aided Dispatch system within roughly two to four minutes of the call being entered. The SPD Call Data dataset publishes Seattle Police Department calls for service after the responding officer assigns a clearance code, which typically introduces a delay of several hours. We merge both into a single chronological feed, categorize them into six visual buckets (fire, medical, traffic, police, hazmat, rescue/other), and refresh the view every thirty seconds.
Each pin on the map corresponds to one dispatch record. Click a pin or a feed entry to highlight it and recenter the map. The address shown is what the City publishes — typically at the block level for police calls and at the dispatch-recorded address for fire calls. Geographic coordinates are accurate to roughly eleven meters, the precision the City publishes them at.
The category color and badge on each entry reflect our own categorization on top of the raw type strings — not the City's. We use straightforward rule-based mapping rather than machine learning, and the rules are documented in our How It Works page. If a categorization choice looks wrong to you, the underlying record is unambiguous; the visual category is a convenience.
A few habits that will help you make sense of what you see. First, the most common dispatch on any given day is "AID Response" — a single-aid-unit medical call. These account for roughly half of all fire dispatches and they are mostly low-severity. Second, "Auto Fire Alarm" dispatches are mostly non-fire activations (burnt food, faulty detectors); the response will usually clear in fifteen minutes. Third, the most significant fire dispatches — "Structure Fire," "Working Fire," "Major Alarm" — draw multiple units across multiple stations and visibly thin out coverage in the surrounding area. Fourth, police pins are always older than fire pins because of the publication-lag difference described above.
If you want a more thorough orientation, the Seattle Fire Department Response Codes article walks through what each type string means, and the SPD Call Types article does the same for police clearances. Both are short and written for general readers.
Seattle Breaking is not a 911 substitute. The data is delayed by minutes for fire calls and hours for police calls. The categorizations are simplified. The site occasionally goes offline when upstream feeds do. If you have an active emergency, call 911. If you need to reach the Seattle Police non-emergency line, it is 206-625-5011. The Seattle Fire non-emergency line is 206-386-1400.
We also do not publish names, conduct investigations, or accept tips. We are not a newsroom and we do not have the resources or the access to act on tips even if we received them. We are an aggregator and visualizer of already-public data, and that is the limit of what we are trying to be.
We publish long-form explainers about Seattle's public-safety infrastructure on the articles page. Recent and ongoing pieces include:
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