Q: I read the story about Seattle having the lowest number of homicides annually since 1956. What are the numbers for previous years?

And what was the city population difference between 1956 and today?

A: Different lists have different counts, some including vehicular homicides and officer-involved shootings. The most reliable lists are in the Seattle police annual reports. Those numbers, used for Tuesday’s story and listed below, don’t include traffic fatalities or officer-involved shootings.

For details on the 19 Seattle homicides in 2010, click here.

The P-I’s list of the 2009 homicides is available here. Our count has 21, which is one lower than the number in the annual report. A spokesman said the police count includes a baby-shaking death case, though the medical examiner has not determined the infant’s manner of death, which is why it was not included in the P-I list.

The P-I’s list of the 2008 homicides is available here. We count 28 – a number from incidents that happened that year – and note that the 29th, which the department counts, is Sebrina Sanders. She was shot and paralyzed in 1993, but died in a care facility in 2008.

Sgt. Sean Whitcomb also said the three fatal officer-involved shootings in 2010 — Ariel Rosenfeld, Vu Hong Quach and the controversial shooting death of John T. Williams — are counted separate from the 19 homicide cases. (Seattle also had three fatal officer-involved shootings in 2009: Miles Murphy, Joseph Bernard Hradec and Maurice Clemmons.)

These are a few examples of how different counts can have conflicting information.

Same could be said for the population numbers: There are different estimates for the population today and in 1956. But if you use the population estimates in Seattle police annual reports, the city had 561,000 people in 1956. The most recent police estimate has 602,000 people in Seattle.

Here are graphs showing the yearly homicide numbers based on the department’s annual report numbers:

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