Tomorrow morning, before the first band hits the stage at Tom Lee Park, roughly 300 security personnel will already be on the ground. They’ll be checking fence lines, testing metal detectors, and running radio checks across a site that stretches from the cobblestones near Beale Street down to the Mississippi River bluff. The 2019 Beale Street Music Festival kicks off Friday and runs through Sunday, and Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings told reporters this week that his department has been planning the security operation since January.
That’s five months of planning for three days of music.
I spent the last two weeks talking to the people responsible for keeping an estimated 100,000 festival-goers safe this weekend. What I found is an operation that’s gotten smarter, more expensive, and a lot more complicated since the early days of Memphis in May.
The Perimeter Problem
Tom Lee Park isn’t easy to secure. It’s a long, narrow strip of land along the river, bordered by Riverside Drive on one side and the Mississippi on the other. There’s no natural boundary to the north or south. Years ago, organizers learned the hard way that cheap temporary fencing wasn’t enough. People would cut through it, crawl under it, or just push it over.
Today, the festival uses eight-foot chain-link fencing along the entire perimeter. Crews from a Nashville-based fencing company started installing it last weekend. I watched them work on Monday morning near the intersection of Riverside and Georgia Avenue, bolting panels together and anchoring them into the ground with weighted bases.
“You can’t just stick a fence in the dirt and hope for the best,” said one of the crew supervisors, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. “We anchor every panel. Every single one.”
The fencing contract alone runs somewhere north of $180,000, according to a source familiar with the festival’s budget. That’s just for the rental, installation, and removal. It doesn’t include the labor for the gates themselves.
Every Gate Has a Metal Detector
There are six public entry points into the festival grounds this year. Each one has walk-through metal detectors, the same type you’d see at a courthouse or airport. Festival organizers added two additional entry points compared to last year, specifically to reduce wait times during peak arrival hours on Friday and Saturday evenings.
I talked to a supervisor with the private security firm handling gate operations. He told me his team will have 12 to 15 people at each gate during peak hours: two on the metal detectors, four doing bag checks, two checking wristbands and tickets, and the rest managing the lines and watching for problems.
“The bag check is where it slows down,” he said. “People bring coolers, backpacks, purses. We check every one. Every pocket, every zipper. That takes time.”
The festival’s clear bag policy, introduced in 2018, has helped. Transparent bags speed up the visual inspection. Still, not everyone follows the rules. The supervisor estimated that about 30 percent of attendees still show up with non-compliant bags on the first day, and his team has to go through each one manually.
Prohibited items include weapons, glass bottles, outside alcohol, drones, professional cameras with detachable lenses, and coolers larger than a standard soft-sided lunch bag. Last year, gate security confiscated over 400 prohibited items across the three-day weekend. The most common? Pocket knives that people forgot they were carrying.
The MPD Footprint
Memphis Police don’t just show up on festival weekend. Rallings assigned a lieutenant to coordinate with Memphis in May organizers back in January. That lieutenant has been working with the private security firms, the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, and even the Coast Guard, which patrols the river side of the park.
MPD will have officers stationed inside the festival grounds and along Riverside Drive. They’ll also run DUI checkpoints on surrounding streets Friday and Saturday nights. Rallings wouldn’t give exact numbers for officer deployment (he never does for large events) but sources within the department put the count at around 150 officers assigned to festival-related duties across all three days.
That’s a significant commitment for a department that’s been dealing with staffing shortages for years. MPD currently has roughly 1,900 sworn officers, down from about 2,300 a decade ago. Pulling 150 officers for festival duty means overtime, shifted schedules, and less coverage elsewhere in the city.
“It’s a balancing act every year,” one MPD sergeant told me over coffee at the Starbucks on Union Avenue. “We can’t leave the rest of Memphis uncovered, and we can’t leave the festival uncovered either.”
The department offsets some of the cost through paid details, officers working festival security on overtime, funded by Memphis in May rather than the city budget. That arrangement has been in place for years, and it works reasonably well for both sides.
Alcohol and the Saturday Night Problem
Anyone who’s attended Beale Street Music Festival on a Saturday night knows the deal. The crowd gets bigger, the drinks flow faster, and the security challenges multiply. Festival organizers have spent years refining their alcohol service protocols, and the current system reflects hard lessons learned.
Beer and mixed drinks are sold at designated vendor stations throughout the park. Each station is staffed by licensed servers who are required to check IDs and cut off visibly intoxicated patrons. Security personnel are stationed near every alcohol vendor to handle disputes and remove anyone who gets aggressive.
The festival also uses a wristband system for age verification. Anyone 21 or older gets a special wristband at the gate after showing valid ID. Vendors check the wristband before every sale. It’s not perfect (wristbands can be transferred) but it’s faster than checking IDs at every transaction.
“Saturday night between 9 and 11 p.m. is our peak,” said one security manager who’s worked the festival for six consecutive years. “That’s when you get the most alcohol-related incidents. Fights, people passing out, medical calls. We staff up heavy for those two hours.”
Medical tents are positioned at three locations inside the park, staffed by EMTs from the Memphis Fire Department and private ambulance services. Last year, the medical team handled over 200 patients across the weekend, the majority for heat-related illness and alcohol overconsumption. One serious injury (a concussion from a fall) required hospital transport.
Lessons From Past Years
The 2019 security plan didn’t appear out of thin air. It’s the product of after-action reviews that happen every year within two weeks of the festival ending.
In 2016, a large fight broke out near the south stage that took security nearly 10 minutes to contain. The review identified the problem: not enough roving patrols in that section of the park. The next year, organizers added dedicated patrol teams, groups of three or four security workers who walk continuous loops through the crowd rather than standing at fixed posts.
In 2017, long entry lines caused a crush situation at the main gate on Saturday afternoon. Nobody was seriously hurt, but it scared organizers enough to redesign the gate layout and add two additional entry points for 2018.
The clear bag policy came after the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting in Las Vegas in October 2017. Memphis in May was one of dozens of festivals nationwide that adopted clear bag rules in response. Attendance didn’t drop, and security screening got faster.
“Every year we sit down after the festival and ask what went wrong, what almost went wrong, and what we got lucky on,” said a senior Memphis in May official. “The ‘almost went wrong’ list is usually the most important one.”
The Cost of Keeping People Safe
Festival security isn’t cheap. Memphis in May doesn’t disclose specific line items from its budget, and the organization declined to provide numbers for this article. However, industry sources and public records give us a rough picture.
Private security guard services for a three-day outdoor festival of this size typically run between $400,000 and $600,000, depending on the number of personnel, hours of coverage, and whether armed guards are used. Add in fencing ($180,000+), metal detectors and screening equipment (typically leased for $30,000-$50,000), medical services, and MPD overtime, and the total security budget likely exceeds $800,000.
That figure has climbed steadily over the past decade. After the Las Vegas shooting, insurance companies began requiring higher security standards for large outdoor events. More guards, more screening, more medical staff. Those requirements aren’t optional, they’re baked into the event insurance policy.
“Security used to be maybe 8 or 9 percent of total event costs for something this size,” said a Nashville-based event security consultant I spoke with by phone. “Now it’s closer to 12 to 15 percent. Some festivals are pushing 20 percent if they’re in a high-risk area.”
Memphis, with its crime rate, qualifies as a high-risk area in the eyes of most insurance underwriters.
What You’ll See This Weekend
If you’re heading to Tom Lee Park this weekend, here’s what to expect at the gates. Arrive early, lines are shortest before 3 p.m. on Friday and before noon on Saturday and Sunday. Bring a clear bag. Leave pocket knives, glass bottles, and full-size coolers at home. Have your ticket or wristband ready before you get in line.
Inside the park, you’ll notice more uniformed security than in past years. Don’t be surprised to see officers on golf carts, bicycle patrols along Riverside Drive, and K-9 units near the main entrance. There will be security cameras mounted on poles throughout the venue, monitored from a command post near the north gate.
If you see something that doesn’t look right, festival organizers want you to say something. There’s a text tip line printed on every ticket and posted at every gate.
Three days, six stages, dozens of acts, and more than 100,000 people crammed into a narrow park along the river. The security team’s job is to make sure you never have to think about them. If they do their jobs right, you’ll go home talking about the music.
That’s the goal every year. So far, Memphis in May has a pretty good track record of hitting it.