What are your biggest public-safety worries? See if they match this citywide survey’s results

The results are in from the latest annual Seattle Public Safety Survey, conducted by Seattle University, which provides results – without personally identifying info/data – to SPD. Here’s how SU summarizes this year’s survey results (which included almost 1,300 responses from our area):

Results of the 2025 Seattle Public Safety Survey are in, with traffic safety, public-order crime, fear of crime, property crime, and laws, policies, and accountability among the top themes participants cited.

The Seattle Public Safety Survey is part of the Seattle Police Department’s Micro-Community Policing Plans, now in its 12th year, and has been administered annually by Seattle University’s Crime and Justice Research Center.

Traffic safety remains the top concern, continuing to rise in prominence in recent years. Participants frequently cited a sense of lawlessness on the roads and a lack of enforcement of safety violations across all types of vehicles, including electric bicycles and scooters.

One of the most significant findings this year is that community capacity rose to the second-highest concern, surpassing both police capacity and property crime for the first time in the survey’s history. This suggests that residents are not just concerned about police response to public safety issues, they are increasingly focused on whether the broader systems and services in place are able to respond effectively.
In addition to identifying top public safety concerns, the survey measures key public safety–related quality-of-life indicators including police legitimacy, social cohesion, informal social control, social disorganization, and fear of crime, at the citywide, precinct, and neighborhood levels. These measures allow community members, practitioners, and policymakers to assess the overall “public safety health” of the city and its 58 micro-communities and to use this data to inform and improve responses.

Police legitimacy ratings — measured on a 100-point scale — declined in 2025 following a brief increase in 2024, which had marked the first improvement after a steady decline from 2020 to 2023. Ratings, which were above 60 in the early years of the survey (peaking at 64.4 in 2016), fell into the 40s and 30s in recent years, reaching a low of 38.7 in 2023, rising to 41.9 in 2024, and declining again to 38.8 in 2025.

Results of the survey will be presented in SPD Community-Police Dialogues on select Mondays from May through August via Zoom. Community members will have opportunities to engage with SPD personnel about the results and discuss public safety concerns at the precinct and neighborhood levels. Registration is available online, and full results can be found on the Seattle Police Department’s Micro-Community Policing Plans website.

The Seattle Public Safety Survey is one of the longest-running efforts in the country to systematically track community perceptions of public safety over time, providing a rare longitudinal view of how trust, fear, and public safety concerns evolve at the neighborhood level.

Southwest Precinct (West Seattle and South Park)-specific results start on page 56 of the results report.

SIDE NOTE: The Micro-Community Policing Plans mentioned above cover neighborhoods chosen because, at the time of this project’s inception, those are the areas that had active neighborhood organizations with which SU and SPD could partner. But the survey every year is open to all, and we (among others) usually announce it a few times to help get the word out when it’s open.

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