Crime in Issaquah
Reported crime, larceny detail, and police workload in Issaquah, January 2019 to today.
The Big Picture
Part A crimes are the serious offenses every police department must report monthly: theft, burglary, assault, robbery and similar. Most crime in Issaquah is property crime, and most of that is larceny theft.
All Part A crimes per month
The total was redefined around 2023 to count every NIBRS category (vandalism, drug violations, simple assault, and so on), not just the classic headline crimes. That redefinition accounts for part of the apparent step up in early 2022. The 2020 spike is a wave of fraudulent unemployment claims during the pandemic (313 fraud cases in May 2020 alone).
Explore by Category
Pick any combination of offense categories. Some categories only exist in the city's reports from mid-2022 onward, when Issaquah PD moved to full NIBRS reporting.
Gaps mean the category wasn't broken out in that era's reports. "Rape" was replaced by the broader "Sex Offenses" category in 2025 reports.
Year over year
Annual totals for the selected categories.
Larceny Theft Breakdown
Larceny is Issaquah's biggest crime category and the reports break it down by type. Theft from vehicles and catalytic converter theft surged in 2022, and shoplifting has been the largest share since then.
Sub-type detail begins September 2021. "Vehicle break-ins & parts" combines theft from motor vehicles with theft of parts (mostly catalytic converters in 2022). Recent shoplifting drops partly reflect big-box stores changing their reporting policies, per IPD.
Police Department Workload
The reports also track how busy the department is. The city changed what it counted in mid-2022, so the two call series don't connect.
Calls & response
Bars: monthly calls (2020–early 2022 = call-center calls, lighter; mid-2022 on = all calls for service, a different definition, which causes the step). Line: average response time to priority-1 emergencies, in minutes (tracked from mid-2022). The gap from April–June 2020 is the city's: April is marked "data not available" in its reports, and May–June predate the report archive.
The Month-by-Month Numbers
Every month and every major category. Each row links to the city's original PDF so you can check the source. Click a column header to sort.
Values reflect the city's most recent restatement of each month (IPD revises counts as cases are reclassified). Blank = not broken out in that era's reports.
Where This Data Comes From
The City of Issaquah publishes a Police Monthly Activity Report as a PDF. The format changed five times in six years, the 2022 to 2024 reports embed their data tables as images, and three months in 2021 were published as scans. We downloaded all 68 PDFs, parsed the text-based eras directly, ran the image-based eras through OCR at 300 dpi, and recovered the scanned months from the "last six months" tables in later reports.
Accuracy: every report restates the same month for up to four years, so most data points were cross-checked against 2 to 4 independent reports. OCR tables were validated by checking that categories sum to the reported Part A total, and every cell the OCR couldn't read confidently was verified by eye against the page image.
Caveats: IPD revises its numbers continuously, so this page uses the city's most recent restatement of each month (the as-first-published numbers are also in the raw data). Counting methodology changed when IPD moved to NIBRS. Categories appear, vanish, and get redefined, so be careful comparing across eras. The city's own disclaimer: data are preliminary and informational.
The five report formats and how each was read
| Period | Format | How we read it |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 2020 – May 2021 | Plain text table, current vs. previous month | Text extraction |
| Jun – Aug 2021 | Scanned images only | Recovered from later reports' six-month tables |
| Sep 2021 – Apr 2022 | Text tables, month × 3–4 years | Text extraction |
| May 2022 – Dec 2024 | Designed PDF, tables embedded as images, 9 categories | 300-dpi OCR + cross-validation |
| Jan 2025 – present | Designed PDF, tables as images, full NIBRS list | 300-dpi OCR + cross-validation |
The complete raw dataset (source PDFs, extraction provenance for every value, and the months where reports disagree) lives in the police-data folder.