What Seattle reports to the city, September 2026
Seattle residents filed 31,453 service requests in September 2026 — potholes, graffiti, illegal dumping, abandoned vehicles, encampments — up 0.8% from a year earlier. The series opens at 4,014 a month in January 2013; its high was 33,503 in August 2025.
This measures reporting, not conditions, and the two come apart. A month with more graffiti reports is a month more people told the city about graffiti, which moves with how easy reporting is at least as much as with how much graffiti there is. Over the span of this chart intake moved from phone calls to the Find It, Fix It apps, and a channel that takes thirty seconds collects complaints a channel that takes ten minutes never heard. Read a rise here as demand for city services being expressed, not as the city getting worse.
The independent check is a feed nobody chooses to file into — the fire department’s 911 dispatches, which are also on this site. Where the two move together, something real is happening; where only this one moves, the channel changed. Requests are dated by when they were created, and one incident reported by three neighbours is three rows.
Source: Seattle Customer Service Bureau, Customer Service Requests, via data.seattle.gov (Socrata 5ngg-rpne), all intake channels. Bench post — generated from the latest observation in the site database.