Public Safety Open Data in the Pacific Northwest: A Field Guide
Published May 11, 2026 · 13 minute read
Seattle is unusually good at public-safety open data by national standards. Its real-time fire dispatch feed is one of a small number in the country that updates within minutes. Its police clearance data is comprehensive, well-documented, and stably maintained. The civic-tech community in Seattle has built a steady output of dashboards, research papers, and analytics products on top of it. But Seattle is not the only jurisdiction in the region publishing public-safety data, and the variations between cities reveal a lot about local policy priorities. This article is a tour.
Seattle: the gold standard, with caveats
The City of Seattle's open-data portal (data.seattle.gov) publishes:
- Seattle Real Time Fire 911 Calls — near-real-time, comprehensive, geocoded, well-documented. The single most useful real-time public-safety feed in the region.
- SPD Call Data — police calls for service, published after clearance with hours of lag. Comprehensive in scope but delayed.
- SPD Crime Data — completed crime reports, published with a longer delay (typically a week or more) and richer detail.
- SPD Use of Force — every reportable use-of-force event by SPD officers, with type, demographic, and outcome fields. Published monthly.
- SPD Officer-Involved Shootings — a separate, narrower dataset of OIS events with case-level detail.
- Fire Inspections — building-level fire inspection results, useful for assessing the safety of older commercial structures.
- Fire Stations — locations, apparatus assignments, and capacity for each SFD station.
- 911 Call Center Performance — monthly summary of answer times, abandoned-call rates, and triage volumes.
What Seattle does not publish: dispatcher-unit audio recordings, full incident narratives, names of involved parties (correctly), and certain investigative records. The omissions are mostly consistent with state public-records law rather than deliberate choices by the City.
The quality is unusual. The data is published in stable formats, schemas change rarely and with notice, and the City staff who maintain the portal are responsive to civic-tech inquiries. None of these things are automatic — many cities publish data that nominally exists but is unmaintained, inconsistently formatted, or quietly deprecated.
King County: the regional layer
King County publishes its own data portal (data.kingcounty.gov) covering the unincorporated areas and providing some county-wide aggregates. The most useful King County public-safety datasets include:
- King County Sheriff's Office calls for service — a delayed clearance feed similar to SPD's, covering KCSO-served jurisdictions (the unincorporated county and contracted cities).
- King County Medic One — paramedic-level response data from the regional Medic One system, of which Seattle Medic 1 is a part.
- Building permits and fire code violations — county-wide aggregations for understanding the fire-risk environment.
King County's data is generally less granular and more delayed than Seattle's. The lag reflects both technical infrastructure (the County operates older systems) and policy (a more conservative approach to release timing).
Bellevue: small but well-curated
The City of Bellevue maintains a smaller open-data portal but the public-safety entries are notably clean. Bellevue Fire publishes a fire-incident dataset with similar geocoding standards to Seattle. Bellevue Police publishes a calls-for-service dataset with consistent type codes and short lags (a few hours, comparable to Seattle SPD).
Bellevue's call volume is much lower than Seattle's — perhaps a fifth as many fire dispatches and a tenth as many police calls in absolute terms — which means the data is easier to query and visualize but less interesting for trend analysis. Bellevue is also a much wealthier and lower-density city, which produces a public-safety profile dominated by medical aid and motor-vehicle calls.
What Bellevue notably does not publish: SWAT activations, use-of-force events at the per-incident level, and most investigative work. Bellevue's transparency is mid-tier nationally — better than most cities, well behind Seattle.
Tacoma: improving but uneven
Tacoma's open-data portal has expanded considerably in the past few years. It now publishes Tacoma Police calls for service and Tacoma Fire dispatch data, both with multi-day lags. Schema documentation is sparser than Seattle's and field naming is inconsistent across datasets, which makes downstream tooling more work to build. The data is useful but it requires more effort to consume.
Tacoma's Public Safety Information System (PSIS) — the integrated platform unifying TPD, Tacoma Fire, and a few smaller agencies — was a significant procurement and continues to evolve. Open-data exports from PSIS appeared first in 2018 and have grown in scope. The expectation is that Tacoma's data feed will look more like Seattle's within a few years.
Portland: the Oregon comparison
Across the Columbia, Portland publishes one of the more mature police calls-for-service datasets in the Pacific Northwest through its CivicApps program. Portland Fire and Rescue's dispatch data is also published, though with more delay than Seattle Fire. The structural difference between Portland and Seattle is that Portland's police bureau publishes more narrative detail per call than SPD does — call summaries, officer notes (redacted), and disposition information. Portland's fire dispatch is somewhat less detailed than Seattle's by contrast.
Portland is also the source of one of the most-cited civic-tech projects in the region: the Code for America brigade's PDX 911 dashboard, which has been running in various forms since around 2014. It demonstrated, before this kind of project was common, that residents would actually use a real-time dispatch view if you built one.
What is conspicuously absent
Cataloging what these jurisdictions publish is only half the story. A few things are conspicuously absent from all of them:
- Real-time police dispatch data, anywhere. Police data is universally clearance-only and lagged. The decision is partly about investigation integrity and partly about officer safety, but the cumulative effect is that the public cannot watch police activity unfold the way it can watch fire activity unfold.
- 911 caller identities, even pseudonymized. Correctly omitted, but it means analyses of "who calls 911 about what" require entirely different data sources (surveys, mostly).
- Unfilled calls and unresolved holds. A 911 call that comes in during a busy hour and waits for an available unit doesn't appear in the dispatch data with its wait time captured. Wait-time analyses depend on internal CAD reports that are usually only released on request.
- Mental health response data, separated from police data. Some calls that go to police are functionally mental-health calls. The data does not generally separate these. Seattle's CARES program publishes some of its own data but the integration with broader 911 data is limited.
- Fire investigation outcomes. A structure fire generates a dispatch record but the eventual cause-of-fire determination, which often takes weeks of arson-investigation work, is not always linked back to the dispatch record in a queryable way.
These gaps shape what civic-tech projects can build and what they can't. A real-time citywide fire map is possible (this site is one). A real-time police map is not. An analysis of which neighborhoods experience longer 911 wait times is hard to construct. An analysis of mental-health 911 demand requires combining multiple datasets across multiple agencies.
How projects use this data
The public-safety open-data ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest supports a steady stream of civic-tech projects beyond live maps:
- Analytical journalism. Local newsrooms — Crosscut, the Seattle Times data team, KUOW — use the data for long-form analyses of trends like response-time disparities, false-alarm patterns, and traffic-incident geography.
- Academic research. University of Washington researchers in public policy, public health, and computer science use the data for studies on cardiac arrest survival (Medic 1's outcomes are world-leading and the data behind them is publicly inspectable), traffic safety, and predictive deployment.
- Equity audits. Civil-society organizations use SPD's data to audit how police activity is distributed across the city and how disposition rates vary by neighborhood. This is one of the more politically charged uses of the data and Seattle's commitment to publishing it has held under significant pressure.
- Real estate and insurance. Less commonly discussed, but worth knowing: insurance underwriters and large real estate brokerages do consume public-safety data for risk modeling. The data is public and they are allowed to use it.
- Resident-facing tools. Dashboards, neighborhood newsletters, mapping projects — including this one — that turn the raw feeds into something residents can read at a glance.
The fragility of the system
Public-safety open data depends on a chain of decisions, any of which can be reversed. Mayors change. Council priorities shift. Police chiefs differ in their views on transparency. Federal pressure around investigative data can lead to release rollbacks. The current state — Seattle as one of the leading public-safety data publishers in the country — is the product of multiple years of cumulative pro-transparency decisions, and it is not guaranteed to persist.
The most important thing residents can do, if they value the existence of this kind of data, is use it. Open-data programs that demonstrate audience and downstream impact survive budget cycles. Programs that publish into the void do not. Every time a civic-tech project, a newsroom analysis, or a research paper cites Seattle Open Data, it helps justify the staff time spent maintaining the program. This is, modestly, one of the reasons we built Seattle Breaking.