The Seattle Police Department (SPD) replaced its Records Management System (RMS) in May 2019. To preserve data quality and continuity between systems (2008-Present), SPD relied on the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The standardization of crime classifications allows for comparison over time. For more information on definitions and classifications, please visit https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/nibrs.

Additional groupings are used to analyze crime in SPD’s Crime Dashboard. Violent and property crime categories align with best practices. For additional inquiries, we encourage the use of the underline data to align with the corresponding query.

Disclaimer: Only finalized (UCR approved) reports are released. Those in draft, awaiting approval, or completed after the update, will not appear until the subsequent day(s). Data is updated once every twenty-four hours. Records and classification changes will occur as a report makes its way through the approval and investigative process.

Graph and download economic data for Combined Violent and Property Crime Offenses Known to Law Enforcement in King County, WA (DISCONTINUED) (FBITC053033) from 2005 to 2021 about King County, WA; crime; violent crime; property crime; Seattle; WA; and USA.

In 2023, the District of Columbia had the highest reported violent crime rate in the United States, with 1,150.9 violent crimes per 100,000 of the population. Maine had the lowest reported violent crime rate, with 102.5 offenses per 100,000 of the population. Life in the District The District of Columbia has seen a fluctuating population over the past few decades. Its population decreased throughout the 1990s, when its crime rate was at its peak, but has been steadily recovering since then. While unemployment in the District has also been falling, it still has had a high poverty rate in recent years. The gentrification of certain areas within Washington, D.C. over the past few years has made the contrast between rich and poor even greater and is also pushing crime out into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs around the District. Law enforcement in the U.S. Crime in the U.S. is trending downwards compared to years past, despite Americans feeling that crime is a problem in their country. In addition, the number of full-time law enforcement officers in the U.S. has increased recently, who, in keeping with the lower rate of crime, have also made fewer arrests than in years past.

Clearance rates for most crimes have remained low and stable for decades (Braga et al., 2011), despite advances in police technologies (Koper et al., 2015). Many police agencies have developed triaging practices for criminal investigations using solvability factors to guess which cases are most likely to be solved and to allocate investigative resources to those crimes (Eck, 1983; 1992). This practice partially stems from a persistent belief that resolving crimes and the resulting clearance rates are due to circumstances of the crime and community context, and are beyond the control of police. However, a growing body of research has challenged this belief, demonstrating that enhanced investigative efforts can improve crime clearance rates beyond solvability factors (Braga and Dusseault, 2018; Lum and Wellford, 2023). In this study, the research team sought to determine if investigative follow-ups could increase clearance rates for robbery and burglary cases (frequently occurring crime types with traditionally low clearance rates) and increase victim satisfaction with police services. Agencies selected for the study were the Seattle Police Department (SPD) in Seattle, Washington, and the Rochester Police Department (RPD) in Rochester, New York. Both agencies triaged a large proportion of robbery cases and would have a large enough sample size to successfully carry out an experiment. The original study design was a randomized controlled trial. In both sites, robbery cases would be allocated to either the intervention condition--an investigative follow-up conducted by an officer during their daily patrol assignment--or the control condition with no follow-up. Challenges to personnel and agency funding from the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and other officer-involved deaths in 2020 led to difficulties implementing the study as initially designed. The experiment was not initiated in Rochester, and initiated but not completed in Seattle. Therefore, the team transitioned to a natural quasi-experiment design in Rochester and added a case analysis of robberies in Seattle. This collection contains three datasets: victim satisfaction surveys from Seattle (DS1, n=39) and Rochester (DS2, n=37), and supplemental reports on follow-ups made during the Seattle experiment implementation (DS3, n=82).

This study extends a prior National Institute (NIJ) funded study on mirco level places that examined the concentration of crime at places over time. The current study links longitudinal crime data to a series of other databases. The purpose of the study was to examine the possible correlates of variability in crime trends over time. The focus was on how crime distributes across very small units of geography. Specifically, this study investigated the geographic distribution of crime and the specific correlates of crime at the micro level of geography. The study reported on a large empirical study that investigated the "criminology of place." The study linked 16 years of official crime data on street segments (a street block between two intersections) in Seattle, Washington, to a series of datasets examining social and physical characteristics of micro places over time, and examined not only the geography of developmental patterns of crime at place but also the specific factors that are related to different trajectories of crime. The study used two key criminological perspectives, social disorganization theories and opportunity theories, to inform their identification of risk factors in the study and then contrast the impacts of these perspectives in the context of multivariate statistical models.

The King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) is providing offense report data captured in it's Records Management System (RMS) from 2020 to present. KCSO replaced its RMS in late 2018 and at the same time transitioned to the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The NIBRS standardization of crime classifications allows for comparison over time and between agencies. For official KCSO NIBRS reporting, please visit the WASPC Crime in Washington Report: https://www.waspc.org/cjis-statistics---reports.

Disclaimer: Only finalized (supervisor approved) reports are released. Those in draft, awaiting supervisor approval, or completed after the daily update of data, will not appear until the subsequent day(s). Data updates once every twenty-four hours. Records and classification changes will occur as a report makes its way through the approval and investigative process, thus reports might appear in the data set one day, but be removed the next day if there is a change in the approval status. This mirrors the fluidity of an investigation. Once a report is re-approved, it will show back up in the data set. Other than approval status, the report case status is factored into what can be released in the daily data set. As soon as a report case status matches the criteria for release, it will be included in the data set. For a list of offenses that are included in the data set, please see the attached pdf.

Resources: - KCSO's 2019 crime data: https://data.kingcounty.gov/Law-Enforcement-Safety/King-County-Sheriff-s-Office-Incident-Dataset/rzfs-wyvy - Police District GIS shapefile: https://gis-kingcounty.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/king-county-sheriff-patrol-districts-patrol-districts-area/explore - Police District key: https://data.kingcounty.gov/Law-Enforcement-Safety/KCSO-Patrol-Districts/ptrt-hdax/data - For more information on definitions and classifications, please visit https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/nibrs - SPD's Crime Data: https://data.seattle.gov/Public-Safety/SPD-Crime-Data-2008-Present/tazs-3rd5