Police response to Bite of Seattle shooting receives positive review

Name: Timeline on Bite of Seattle shooting investigation
Uploaded: 2026-08-17T12:57:32-07:00
Description: Questions and controversy continue to surround the City of Seattle's response to the Bite of Seattle shooting after a public safety meeting was supposed to bring more clarity on Tuesday.

Timeline on Bite of Seattle shooting investigation

Questions and controversy continue to surround the City of Seattle's response to the Bite of Seattle shooting after a public safety meeting was supposed to bring more clarity on Tuesday.

SEATTLE - The Seattle Police Department has received a positive review from the city's Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Department for its response to the shooting that occurred during the Bite of Seattle festival.

According to CARE, its "preliminary research" did not find any major policy violations that could have negatively impacted the response or safety of first responders or the community using data obtained from radio traffic, phone records, and Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD).

The findings come almost one week after Mayor Katie Wilson requested an independent review of "the flow of public information" following the shooting on July 26.

CARE Seattle statistics

What they're saying:

In its report, CARE Seattle said it first received notification about the Bite of Seattle shooting through a precinct talk group at 6:01 p.m.

The agency's timeline says that less than one minute later, a "shots fired" alert was announced through police tactical channels, a citywide "help the officer" alert was broadcast, and additional police units were assigned to respond to the incident.

At 6:21 p.m., CARE noted that the department's CSI and Homicide units had communicated about the case, and by 6:34 p.m., a Seattle police officer had been briefed on the situation.

At 6:52 p.m., a SWAT commander had been notified about the shooting, and eight minutes later, a SWAT callout was administered through Alert Seattle.

The full timeline posted by CARE Seattle can be found below.

Amy Barden, the chief of CARE Seattle, said that first responders on the front lines were "exceptional" during their response.

Call count spikes during Bite of Seattle shooting

By the numbers:

CARE Seattle shared a list showing the number of calls and average answer time for those calls in 15-minute increments, which showed a massive spike when the Bite of Seattle shooting took place.

From 5 p.m. to 5:45 p.m., the number of calls received in a 15-minute timeframe never exceeded 25 and the average answer time was below two seconds.

However, at 6 p.m., the number of calls nearly quadrupled, reaching 95 with an average answer time of 48.8 seconds.

Barden said that dispatchers did a great job of handling the 300% uptick in volume during this time.

The full log can be seen below.

Why did CARE Seattle release the timeline?

The backstory:

Since the Bite of Seattle shooting happened over three weeks ago, questions have remained over how the city communicated with residents; specifically, why it took so long for the city to hold an official news conference to provide updates on what exactly happened.

In the aftermath of those questions, city leadership has attempted to explain why information took so long to be released and what was happening behind the scenes that led to the delay.

An example of this was when Bob Kettle, a Seattle councilmember and chair of the Public Safety Committee, posted a timeline of events to share his perspective of how events unfolded on July 26.

Another example involves Mayor Katie Wilson, who last week requested an independent after-action review of how information was handled following the shooting.

"The people of Seattle deserve timely, accurate information after major public safety events, and I want to understand clearly how the process can be improved," Wilson said in a statement. "The Inspector General’s office is the right entity to conduct this review, and I am directing every department to give them full cooperation."

What's next:

Chief Amy Barden tells FOX 13 that the agency is doing a full after-action review with involved employees on Wednesday. That review will then be sent to the mayor's office to be "synthesized with other departments' reviews."

The Source: Information in this story came from CARE Seattle and original FOX 13 Seattle reporting.