About 30 minutes after gunshots rang out and a chaotic scene continued to unfold at a Seattle Center food festival July 26, the Seattle Police Department posted a warning on X to its 549,000 followers:

“Police are investigating a shooting. Multiple shooting victims. Shots fired at the Seattle Center. More information to come. Please avoid the area.”

The promised information didn’t come for five hours — by then, thousands had fled from the bullets and rumors about the number of victims and alleged shooters, at least one of whom has yet to be arrested, swirled in a social media ecosystem that thrives on misinformation.

Soon after the shooting, Mayor Katie Wilson acknowledged the lack of communication, saying information “could and should” have gone out faster through social media and the city’s official emergency alert system, called AlertSeattle, among other communication methods. The lapses contributed, in part, to former police Chief Shon Barnes' requested resignation.

Seattle, like other cities and police departments throughout the U.S. that have faced shootings in recent years, now plans to conduct a review of how it alerted the public.

“The public should have heard sooner about outstanding suspects and the status of the Seattle Center campus,” Wilson said July 30 in a video statement. “We will be working with SPD to ensure that communications go out much sooner in the future, should anything like this happen again.”

Although It’s difficult to make direct comparisons of police responses to shootings, other cities' responses and the lessons they learned could provide a window into Seattle’s path forward.

The Seattle Police Department and Wilson’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Each Shooting Is Different

Cities’ and police departments’ communication response following a mass shooting take many forms — social media posts, text alerts, livestreamed news conferences — and are ever evolving as communication and social media use changes.

Jake Becchina, a captain and spokesperson for the Kansas City Police Department, says it's very hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison" between shootings and how departments respond.

After one person was killed and more than 20 others were wounded in a shooting during a Super Bowl victory celebration for the Kansas City Chiefs outside Union Station in 2024, Kansas City police posted on X and sent out emails, within 10 minutes, telling people that a shooting had occurred and to leave the area.

Police had three working public information officers at the rally, which is common practice for the department during large events, according to Becchina.

These officers are paired with public relations specialists, who can shift quickly from content gathering to content creation and dissemination in the event of a crisis, which they did at the parade shooting.

Kansas City police hosted a news conference less than two hours after the shooting and posted several social media updates in between, directing attendees where to go for a reunification center and witnesses to give statements.

In Providence, R.I., Brown University sent multiple text alerts to students and faculty within 20 minutes after a shooting that killed two students and wounded nine others during a finals week study session in December. These alerts incorrectly reported a suspect in custody and shots fired on a nearby street and were later corrected.

Providence sent a text alert an hour after the shooting on an opt-in alert system similar to Alert Seattle, warning residents of a police presence and to avoid the area. Police then posted on social media that multiple people had been shot and to shelter in place. The shooter was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after fatally shooting a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, ending a five-day search.

"The incident reinforced the importance of communicating quickly, accurately, and consistently during rapidly evolving situations, said Kristy dosReis, a spokesperson for the Providence Police Department.

Police considered using reverse-911 alerts, also known as Wireless Emergency Alerts, but decided against it, since they can override devices’ silence settings and reveal where people are hiding, which also poses a risk to emergency responders, dosRies said.

Wilson said AlertSeattle would have been a good tool to use but wasn’t activated because of a miscommunication between departments. These opt-in alert systems are widely used for regional emergencies.

In Lewiston, Maine, police also found social media posts to be a quick and effective way to communicate with the public after 18 people were killed in a pair of shootings in 2023, prompting the state’s largest and most complex search in history.

In the four days after the shooting, Maine State Police held six news conferences and put out 11 social media posts, which were viewed by 5 million people, about four times the population of Maine, according to an after-action review from the state police.

Seattle to Conduct Third-Party Review of Shooting

After-action reviews can help police departments reflect on their communication during a crisis after the adrenaline of the event has dissipated and are common practice after large emergency responses.

On Aug. 11, Wilson formally requested Seattle’s city inspector general, Lisa Judge, to conduct a third-party review of “the lack of public information” after the Bite of Seattle shooting.

Under the inspector general’s supervision, the third-party review will be released in the fall, according to a spokesperson for the mayor’s office.

Judge plans to bring in experts on mass shooting communication to assist with the report, Alison Holcomb, Wilson’s director of public safety, said during a City Council public safety meeting.

From an operations standpoint, Seattle police officers did what they were supposed to do, said Julie Parker, who runs Julie Parker Communications, a firm that works with law enforcement agencies. Police officers responded, rushed toward the danger and did what the public expected them to do.

But from a public relations standpoint, she said, the department failed.

“That’s not fair, not only to the public, but it’s not fair to the police department itself,” she said. “Think about what their job is: Going in as someone is shooting people and going in to stop that threat. And so instead of this country or the world hearing about the heroic efforts officers took, instead, we’re dealing with a public relations crisis, about the lack of strong crisis communication.”

“Public information sharing is a critical component of law enforcement in 2026,” Parker said. “We have to share information quickly and accurately, we've got the tools to do it.”

At the public safety meeting on Aug. 11, Holcomb echoed a previous explanation by interim police Chief Andre Sayles, who said a news conference after the shooting was delayed due to a SWAT team following a tip about a suspect in the Imax theater. She acknowledged there were other channels to inform the public and hopes the review will provide insight on how the city can improve.

_________________

© 2026 The Seattle Times.

Visit www.seattletimes.com.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.