King County Metro says some incident types fell in 2024; outlines 2025 safety, deployment plans

King County Metro briefed the Regional Transit Committee on April 16 on safety and security metrics requested by a King County Council budget proviso, reporting mixed trends across incident types and describing planned 2025 responses.

Metro Deputy General Manager Ernest Khandugy and Metro Chief Safety Officer Rebecca Frankhauser told the committee the agency uses employee-filed security incident reports, normalized per million boardings, to guide deployments and measure progress.

Frankhauser said Metro recorded 79 transit worker assaults in 2023 and 85 in 2024 — about “less than 1 transit worker assault per million boardings” overall — and that drug-use reports fell from 1,236 incidents in 2023 to 678 in 2024 (about 103 per month in 2023 versus 56.5 per month in 2024). Other incident categories changed more modestly: passenger disturbances were about 34 per month in 2023 and 35 per month in 2024; harassment and threats rose from about 44 to 67 per month; and “sleeper/non-destination riders” rose from an average of 96 to 117 per month. Frankhauser also said roughly one-third of reported incidents occurred on vehicles and roughly one-third at stops; about 12% occurred at layover facilities.

Metro staff listed the agency’s top routes for incident reports as the A Line, E Line, 7, D Line, F Line, Route 150, Route 36, C Line, Route 40 and Route 75. Staff said data showing concentrations of incidents at terminal layover locations prompted earlier deployments of transit security officers at those terminals and that those deployments helped stabilize incident trends.

To reduce incidents during 2025 Metro described a four-pronged approach: Metro Transit Police, transit security officers, “safe ambassadors” and behavioral-health specialists, plus field supervisors and other rapid responders. Frankhauser said the agency will continue agile, data-driven deployments and may propose additional staffing, technology or infrastructure investments as part of future county budget discussions. She told the committee the King County Regional Transit Safety Task Force — a cross-sector group that includes elected leaders, social-service and law-enforcement partners — is expected to deliver recommendations to the County Council in September.

On staffing, Metro told the committee it has 70 authorized transit security officer positions and indicated those positions are substantially staffed; Metro Transit Police has 65 of 79 authorized positions filled, Metro leaders said, and acknowledged hiring police officers is a national challenge.

Committee members asked whether Metro cross-checks employee incident reports with customer reports and local police records; Metro staff said customer reports are tracked separately and that systems do not currently communicate automatically, though employee reports drive resource deployment. Council members also asked about fentanyl exposure; Metro referenced a University of Washington study with other agencies that concluded such exposure was not a hazard to employees.

Chair Jorge Barron and committee members asked Metro to provide the raw incident counts in addition to the per-million-boardings metrics presented; Metro agreed to share the data after the meeting.

The briefing was informational; no formal committee action on Metro’s safety briefing was taken. Committee members thanked Metro for the data and for work on regional coordination.