Seattle’s crime rate, August 2026
Seattle recorded 1.37 offences against persons per 1,000 residents in August 2026, and 4.93 offences against property per 1,000. In plain counts that is 1,125 offences against persons; the rate is the same fact with the city’s size divided out. Police also recorded 543 crimes against society, down 0.7% on the year.
The division is the point of the first two charts. Seattle has added well over a hundred thousand people since these records begin, so a count that rose ten per cent over a decade in which the population rose fifteen describes a city getting safer. Over the series the persons rate has run between 1.01 (February 2025) and 1.84 (August 2008) per thousand. The spike early in the property series is May 2020, a single night of widespread downtown break-ins during the George Floyd protests — one event, not a trend, and left in rather than smoothed away.
The third chart is a count, and it measures something else. Crimes against society are NIBRS’s third category: drug and narcotics offences, weapons violations, prostitution, gambling — offences with no individual complainant. Nobody calls 911 to report a drug offence against themselves, so this line measures enforcement, not incidence: it rises when a unit is staffed or a directive changes and falls when attention moves elsewhere. Dividing it by population would dress a record of what the department chose to do as a rate of something residents experience, so it stays a count.
Caveats that carry every month: this is crime reported to police, so it moves with reporting behaviour. It counts offences, not incidents. Recent months revise upward. The charts start in 2020 because SPD changed records systems in 2019. And the rate denominator is Washington OFM’s April 1 population estimate, interpolated in a straight line between years, because a step would put a false annual sawtooth into every rate here. For the counts behind the rates, see the monthly crime post.
Sources: Seattle Police Department, SPD Crime Data 2008-Present, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata tazs-3rd5), NIBRS categories; Washington State Office of Financial Management April 1 population estimates for the city of Seattle, interpolated to monthly. Auto-generated each build.