As chief points to Seattle drop, Capitol Hill and Central District crime holds stubbornly steady

Mayor Katie Wilson said she was choosing continuity and progress on community safety when she stuck with Chief Shon Barnes as she built a new administration at Seattle City Hall. This week, the chief said the Seattle Police Department is making progress under his command with overall crime down 18% and murders dropping from 79 in 2024 to 58 last year.

You can review SPD crime statistics for the city and East Precinct here.

Reports of shots fired and gun violence also fell in 2025 down 18% across Seattle and 34% across the East Precinct.

The city’s most recently reported crime rates from 2024 show Seattle still has a property crime problem compared to its national counterparts but has less violent crime than similar sized cities.

Against this backdrop of statistical success across the city, crime across Capitol Hill, the Central District and the rest of the East Precinct stood stubbornly steady with a few hopeful signs and a couple of trouble spots.

Overall, reported East Precinct crime fell 9% with property crimes like burglary and theft and violent crimes like assaults down in equal measure compared to 2024.

Crimes like burglaries, theft, assaults, and robberies have held mostly steady across the East Precinct over the past three years, concentrated in areas around commercial centers and grocery stores.

Still, reported burglaries dropped 20% in the East Precinct in 2025. They fell only 14% across the city.

Homicides across Capitol Hill and the Central District fell to five in 2025 after spiking to a dozen in 2024. The 2025 killings were concentrated in a troubled hot spot for the precinct — the blocks around Cal Anderson and Pike and Broadway.

Reported sexual assaults (79) and arson fires (35) in the East Precinct continued to climb and the smaller drops in stealing including car thefts and prowls kept East Precinct from matching the overall drop reported in the rest of Seattle.

At a press conference this week, Barnes said his “Seattle-Centric Policing Plan” is making the city safer. In his announcement on the 2025 totals, Barnes said the plan “takes Seattle’s values into account, involves deepening city engagement to take a ‘whole of government’ approach, deepening community partnerships to foster trust, responsibly using technology, and deploying evidence-based strategies.”

Hiring and retention have also been a focus. Barnes has overseen progress in what officials say is a reversal of SPD’s hiring challenges and a department being pushed to grow its ranks from just under 1,000 officers on patrol in 2022 to nearly 1,500 by 2027. Those goals will be a significant challenge as police forces across the country continue to slowly climb back from the nationwide, across-industry staffing crisis of the pandemic.

SPD Assistant Chief Robert Brown told a Capitol Hill community meeting late last year that the improved hiring conditions will begin to pay real dividends in 2026 as there will finally be more officers he can deploy to cover the city’s round-the-clock shifts. Boosted salaries and generous bonuses have been a core to the change though the department’s overtime policies continue to be an issue, Brown said, as officers can choose to make more working overtime at a stadium event over working a standard shift.

The East Precinct and Capitol Hill also have benefitted in recent months from four bike officers “on loan” from SPD’s citywide ranks and deployed here, Brown said.

SPD’s Real-Time Crime Center has also made an impact with installations active in the International District, downtown, and along Aurora.

While still restricted in what types of incidents they can respond to, the city’s CARE crisis responders are also starting to shoulder a greater load of daily 911 calls in the East Precinct and across the city. CARE currently makes about three responses a day around Capitol Hill.

The Seattle police union often claims the department’s stats are meaningless and says people have stopped reporting crimes. The SPD dispatch data mostly debunks the claim as “community generated” 911 calls in the East Precinct continue to climb.

Response times for those who call remain an issue. In 2024, CHS reported that SPD’s response times for the lowest priority calls hit 1 hour, 43 minutes.

Meanwhile, in the East Precinct, Chief Barnes is climbing back from a rough start including  the bumbled promotion of a new commander in theEast Precinct, May’s policing debacle around the anti-trans Christian rally that led to a police crackdown on counter-protesters in Cal Anderson Park, the chief’s continued deployment of “directed patrols” as part of abatement efforts at the Denny Blaine Park nude beach, and his rejected push to station a police officer inside Garfield High School.

Meanwhile, Mayor Wilson has said she is “reviewing options” over installation of Real-Time Crime Center cameras around Capitol Hill and the Central District over concerns about security and safety related to the federal immigration crackdown.

SPD’s Real-Time Crime Center architect Capt. Jim Britt is now in charge of the East Precinct.

Chief Barnes, meanwhile, said 2026 will bring continued efforts including expanding SPD’s new Neighborhood Resource Officer Programs, “which puts more officers in your local neighborhoods.” The new sub-precinct locations will be at 3rd and James and at 12th and Jackson — both Seattle crime hotspots.

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