Seattle’s crime rate, July 2026
Seattle recorded 1.36 offences against persons per 1,000 residents in July 2026, and 4.56 offences against property per 1,000. In plain counts that is 1,118 offences against persons; the rate is the same fact with the city’s size divided out.
That division is the entire point of this post. 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, and the monthly crime post — which charts counts, correctly, because that is what a monthly update reports — cannot show you that. 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, when downtown Seattle saw a single night of widespread break-ins during the George Floyd protests; property offences that month ran to roughly double any other month in the series. It is one event, not a trend, and it is left in rather than smoothed away.
Three caveats carry over from the count version and one is new. This is crime reported to police, so it moves with reporting behaviour. It counts offences, not incidents. Recent months revise upward. And the denominator is Washington OFM’s April 1 population estimate — one figure a year — interpolated in a straight line between estimates, because treating it as a step would put a false annual sawtooth into every rate on this page.
Sources: Seattle Police Department, SPD Crime Data 2008-Present, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata tazs-3rd5); Washington State Office of Financial Management April 1 population estimates for the city of Seattle, interpolated to monthly. Auto-generated each build.