Is Burien, Washington Safe? Safest Neighborhoods & Other Stats (2026)

Burien's Crime Numbers, Explained

Property crime — not violent crime — is the dominant story in Burien's safety data. The city's 33.9 property crimes per 1,000 residents is the figure that drives most of the concern you'll find online. Violent crime at 4.25 per 1,000 sits only modestly above the U.S. national rate of 3.59 per 1,000 recorded in 2024, which was itself the lowest national figure since 1969.

Within the property crime category, motor vehicle theft has historically been the standout problem. FBI 2024 data identified motor vehicle theft running at roughly three times the national average rate for Burien — a real issue in a city where street parking is common and many older homes lack garages. Larceny-theft and burglary round out the top property crime types.

The 2025 trend data is where the picture gets meaningfully better.

The robbery and burglary declines are substantial — nearly half in a single year. Motor vehicle theft, the city's most chronic property crime, fell by more than a third. Those are the categories that most directly affect day-to-day life for residents.

The murder increase from 2 to 6 offenses is the honest counterweight. Six homicides in a city of roughly 52,000 people is a rate worth acknowledging — even if the small absolute numbers mean a single cluster of incidents can swing a percentage dramatically. Rape offenses also ticked upward. Anyone who tells you Burien's 2025 crime story is uniformly positive is reading only half the report.

How Burien Compares to South King County

Crime statistics only mean something relative to somewhere. The most useful comparison for Burien isn't the national average — it's the other South King County cities you're likely considering at the same time.

Burien sits in the middle of this peer group — above Des Moines and SeaTac, roughly even with Auburn and Kent, and dramatically below Tukwila. If you're cross-shopping Burien against Normandy Park (which borders it to the south), Normandy Park is generally quieter, though it's a much smaller and less commercially active city.

The state context is worth one more beat. Washington's property crime rate of roughly 24.67 per 1,000 ranked it third-worst in the nation in 2024. Burien's 33.9 is elevated even within that elevated state picture — but it means you're dealing with a statewide problem concentrated in a city with a particularly active commercial and transit corridor, not a uniquely dangerous place by Pacific Northwest standards.

What surprises most people who move here from the Eastside or from out of state: the property crime they worried about before moving rarely touches them in the residential neighborhoods, but a car break-in near the Town Square or along the 1st Avenue South corridor can happen within the first few months. That pattern — residential areas feeling calmer than the numbers suggest, high-traffic commercial areas feeling less calm — is the lived reality of Burien's crime distribution.

Neighborhood-by-Neighborhood Safety Picture

Burien's eight canonical neighborhoods don't experience crime evenly. The southwest residential tier — closest to the Puget Sound shoreline — is the quietest part of the city. The closer you get to the Sea-Tac Airport corridor and the city's main commercial spine along 1st Avenue South, the more the property crime figures climb.

Three Tree Point and Seahurst

These two shoreline neighborhoods, anchored by Seahurst (Ed Munro) Park on the water's edge, are among the most consistently calm areas in Burien. The streets are residential and relatively low-traffic, dead-ending toward the water rather than flowing through to commercial zones. Residents here tend to describe the area as feeling removed from the city's headline crime activity.

Best for: Families Quiet

Shorewood

Shorewood sits along the western edge of the city with Sound-view streets and a similarly low-density character. It shares the quiet residential feel of the Three Tree Point area without the same level of name recognition, which can mean slightly better value for comparable peace of mind. See the full neighborhood breakdown for pricing context.

Best for: Quiet Views

Gregory Heights and Lake Burien

These inland residential neighborhoods are more mixed. They're not high-crime areas, but they're also not insulated from the property crime patterns that affect the broader city. Lake Burien itself — a private lake with community access — adds a neighborhood anchor that tends to attract longer-term, owner-occupant households.

Best for: Families Nature

Olde Burien and Five Corners

Olde Burien is the city's walkable commercial core, and the stretch along SW 152nd St brings foot traffic and evening activity to that area. More activity generally means more property crime exposure — car break-ins near restaurant parking lots are the most common complaint. Five Corners, centered on its own retail intersection, has a similar dynamic.

Neither area is dangerous in a way that should deter you from living there, but parking a car on the street overnight near those commercial nodes without taking precautions is the kind of thing longer-term residents learn not to do.

Best for: Walkable Renters

Boulevard Park

Boulevard Park sits in the city's northeast corner, adjacent to White Center (unincorporated King County) and closer to the Sea-Tac corridor. It's the part of Burien where the city's overall crime figures are most felt at a neighborhood level. It's also the most affordable entry point into the city, which is a real trade-off worth understanding before you choose a block.

Best for: First-Time Buyers Value

What Burien Is Doing About Public Safety

Burien doesn't operate its own police department. All law enforcement services are contracted through the King County Sheriff's Office — patrol, criminal investigations, gang investigations, bomb disposal, a canine unit, and a specialized tactical response team all fall under that contract. For day-to-day policing, that means the city's responsiveness is tied to the county's resource allocation and dispatch priorities.

The 2025 crime reduction didn't happen by accident. Police Chief Tom Calabrese publicly credited the city's dedicated Crime Reduction Unit as the primary driver. The unit operates on what's called "onview" policing — officers act when they directly witness a crime, rather than waiting for a 911 call to come in. That proactive model is what drove the sharpest declines in robbery and burglary, categories where rapid response to observed behavior makes the biggest difference.

Community-Facing Programs Worth Knowing

The city's Community Crime Prevention Unit offers free security surveys for both homes and businesses using Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) methods — essentially, a trained officer walks your property and identifies environmental changes (lighting, sightlines, landscaping) that reduce crime opportunity. That's a genuinely useful resource that most new residents don't know exists.

Burien and SeaTac also jointly run a Community Police Academy — a free six-week course run in partnership with the King County Sheriff's Office, open to anyone 18 or older who lives or works in either city and has no prior felony conviction. It's not just a PR exercise; it's a practical way to understand how policing actually works in the city before you need it.

The Collaborative Approaches to Crime Reduction program is the county-level complement to the city's Crime Reduction Unit, addressing the social-service side of repeat offenders — the chronic-offender population that drives a disproportionate share of property crime citywide. Whether you think that approach is effective or not, understanding that it exists explains why Burien's strategy looks different from a city that focuses exclusively on enforcement.

What to Know Before You Decide on a Neighborhood

The single most important thing to understand about researching safety in Burien: the city-level statistics mask enormous internal variation. A 33.9 property crime rate averaged across all of Burien includes the quiet cul-de-sacs of Three Tree Point and the parking lots along the Airport Way commercial corridor in the same figure. Those two environments are not remotely equivalent to live in.

What Locals Actually Do

Long-term residents in the southwest neighborhoods around Seahurst and Shorewood describe their blocks as genuinely calm — the kind of calm where neighbors leave bikes unlocked occasionally and nobody thinks much about it. That's a different experience from what you'll hear from someone who rented an apartment near Five Corners and had their car window punched in twice in a year. Both accounts are accurate; they're just describing different parts of the same city.

The practical habit most Burien residents develop: never leave anything visible in a parked car, anywhere in the city, but especially near commercial nodes. It sounds obvious, but motor vehicle theft running at three times the national average means the threshold for a break-in attempt is lower here than in most cities. A jacket on a seat or a charging cable on the console is enough.

What Newcomers Don't Expect

People who move here from quieter suburbs are often surprised to find that Burien's residential streets feel calmer than they expected, while the Town Square area around Burien Town Square and the 1st Avenue South corridor can feel more chaotic than they expected — especially on weekend evenings. The geographic split between the city's residential southwest and its commercial northeast isn't intuitive from a map, but it's the single most useful frame for understanding where you'll feel most comfortable living.

One thing worth doing before settling on a specific block: check the King County Sheriff's Office crime mapping tool, which shows reported incidents by address and lets you look at a specific street rather than a city-wide average. City-level statistics are a starting point; block-level data is what actually helps you choose between two houses a mile apart.

The 2025 trend data is encouraging, and the Crime Reduction Unit's proactive model is producing documented results. But Burien is still a city in active transition on the public safety front — not a problem solved, and not the place it was being described as three years ago either.

Quick Takeaways & FAQs

✅ Reported crime in Burien fell 20.6% in 2025, with robbery down nearly 43% and burglary down nearly 49% — documented improvements driven by the city's dedicated Crime Reduction Unit.

⚠️ Motor vehicle theft runs at roughly three times the national average rate, and the property crime rate of 33.9 per 1,000 is elevated even for Washington State, which itself ranked third-worst nationally for property crime in 2024.

📍 The southwest neighborhoods — Three Tree Point, Seahurst, and Shorewood — experience Burien's crime picture very differently from the commercial corridors near Five Corners and Boulevard Park; city-level averages obscure that gap.

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