On February 8, Attorney General Merrick Garland stood at a podium in Washington and confirmed what most people in Memphis already assumed was coming. The Department of Justice, he said, was reviewing whether to open a “pattern-or-practice” investigation into the Memphis Police Department. Five weeks after Tyre Nichols died from injuries sustained during a traffic stop on January 7, and one week after body camera footage turned a local tragedy into a national story, the federal government was circling.
For anyone running a security operation in Shelby County, this isn’t just a policing story. It’s a regulatory story, a market story, and potentially a story about how every guard wearing a badge in Tennessee will be trained and supervised three years from now.
What a Pattern-or-Practice Investigation Actually Means
The legal authority comes from 34 U.S.C. Section 12601, passed by Congress in 1994 after the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles. It gives the DOJ power to investigate whether a law enforcement agency has engaged in a “pattern or practice” of violating constitutional rights. If investigators find enough evidence, the federal government can sue the city and force changes through a court-supervised agreement called a consent decree.
Think of a consent decree as a binding contract between a city and the federal government, enforced by a judge. An independent monitor gets appointed to track compliance. The city pays for everything: the monitor, the reforms, the new training programs, the updated technology systems. Ferguson, Missouri spent over $1.5 million on monitoring costs alone in the first two years after its consent decree took effect in 2016.
The process typically takes 18 to 24 months from the initial announcement to a final agreement, though it can stretch longer. The Obama administration opened 25 such investigations and secured at least 15 consent decrees. Cities that went through it include Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, New Orleans, Seattle, and Albuquerque.
Memphis would join a list nobody wants to be on.
What Happened in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Chicago
Each city tells a slightly different story, and the details matter for anyone trying to predict what Memphis might face.
Ferguson entered its consent decree in March 2016, roughly 19 months after Michael Brown’s death. The DOJ’s investigation found that Ferguson police routinely violated the First and Fourth Amendment rights of residents, used excessive force, and issued citations primarily as a revenue-generation tool. The decree required overhauling use-of-force policies, retraining every officer, installing body cameras, and creating a civilian review board. Ferguson’s police department, which had 54 officers at the time, struggled to recruit and retain staff under the new requirements. Attrition hit 30% in the first year.
Baltimore agreed to a consent decree in January 2017 after the DOJ found that officers regularly conducted stops without reasonable suspicion, used excessive force during encounters, and discriminated against Black residents. The monitoring process has cost Baltimore’s city government tens of millions of dollars. Six years later, the city is still under federal oversight. Police staffing has dropped from roughly 2,900 officers in 2017 to around 2,400.
Chicago entered its consent decree in March 2019 following an investigation triggered by the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald. The decree runs 236 pages and covers use of force, training, accountability, data collection, and community policing. It’s the most detailed consent decree ever negotiated with a major American police department.
Minneapolis is still in the early stages. The DOJ opened its investigation in April 2021 after Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Investigators released their findings in June 2023 (that report hasn’t dropped yet as I write this, so we’re watching), and a consent decree is expected to follow.
The pattern across all these cities: investigations take time, findings are damning, reforms are expensive, and police departments lose officers faster than they can hire.
The Private Security Angle Nobody’s Discussing
Here’s where this gets directly relevant to the security industry. In every city that went through a DOJ consent decree, the private security market grew. Not because the consent decree created demand on its own, but because the ripple effects changed how businesses, property managers, and neighborhood associations thought about safety.
In Baltimore, the number of TDCI-equivalent licensed security companies in the state grew by roughly 12% between 2017 and 2020. Some of that was organic market growth, sure. Some of it tracked directly to reduced police presence in commercial corridors as BPD dealt with staffing shortfalls.
In Chicago, business improvement districts that had relied on supplemental police patrols started contracting private security firms within months of the consent decree announcement. The Magnificent Mile, Wicker Park, and Pilsen all added private patrols. One Chicago security company owner told the Tribune in 2020 that his contract volume had increased 40% since the decree went into effect.
In Ferguson and the surrounding St. Louis County municipalities, small security firms picked up contracts from businesses that could no longer rely on consistent police response times. A 2018 report from the Missouri Private Security Advisory Commission noted a 15% increase in new company license applications in the Greater St. Louis area between 2016 and 2018.
Memphis is already a strong private security market. Shelby County has one of the highest per-capita concentrations of licensed security companies in the Southeast. If a consent decree restricts how MPD deploys officers, especially in high-crime commercial areas, the gap will need filling. Private security is the obvious candidate.
What Could Change for Tennessee’s Security Industry
Tennessee regulates private security through the Department of Commerce and Insurance (TDCI), specifically the Private Protective Services board. The governing statute is T.C.A. Section 62-35-101 et seq. As of January 1, 2023, new training requirements took effect: unarmed guards now need refresher training every two years, and armed guards must complete four hours of refresher training plus firearms requalification on a biennial basis.
Those requirements are already stricter than what existed a year ago. A DOJ investigation into MPD could push things further in two ways.
First, there’s the political pressure angle. When federal investigators start asking questions about use of force in a city, the scrutiny doesn’t stay neatly contained to the police department. State legislators look for ways to appear proactive. Tennessee’s General Assembly could introduce bills tightening private security training standards, expanding background check requirements, or adding use-of-force reporting mandates for contract security companies. It happened in Maryland after Baltimore’s decree. The legislature passed additional security guard training requirements in 2018.
Second, there’s the insurance angle. Liability insurers pay close attention to DOJ investigations. If Memphis PD ends up under a consent decree that specifically addresses use-of-force failures, insurance carriers may start asking harder questions about force policies at every security company operating in Shelby County. Premiums could rise. Companies with weak training documentation could find themselves uninsurable.
For security operators already doing things right, this is an opportunity. Companies with documented training programs, clear use-of-force policies, and GPS-verified patrol records will have a competitive edge when businesses start asking tougher questions about their providers.
TDCI’s Role Going Forward
TDCI currently processes roughly 4,000 individual guard registrations per year statewide. The board has enforcement authority to revoke or suspend registrations for cause, and the new 2023 training rules give regulators more tools to hold companies accountable.
What TDCI hasn’t done, at least not yet, is require security companies to report use-of-force incidents. Police departments have (theoretically) had this requirement for decades. Private security operates with far less reporting oversight. If a consent decree in Memphis includes provisions about use-of-force documentation and accountability, it’s not hard to imagine TDCI adopting parallel requirements for the private sector.
This would be a significant change. Most security companies in Tennessee don’t track use-of-force incidents in any standardized way. The handful that do are mostly large national firms like Allied Universal, Securitas, and GardaWorld, who have corporate-level compliance departments. Smaller regional operators would need to build these systems from scratch.
The companies that get ahead of this will be the ones that survive. The ones that wait for the regulation to land on their desk will scramble.
What Memphis Security Operators Should Do Now
Don’t wait for the DOJ to announce anything. The investigation, if it comes, will take months or years to produce results. The market is shifting now.
Review your use-of-force policy and make sure it’s written down, not just understood informally. Get your training records in order. If you’re an armed security provider, verify that every guard’s firearms qualification is current under the new 2023 TDCI standards. Document everything.
Start tracking how your officers handle confrontations. Even a simple incident report form is better than nothing. When a client asks, “What’s your use-of-force protocol?” you want an answer that doesn’t start with “Well, basically…”
The TDCI license verification portal at tn.gov/commerce is public. Your clients can check it. Your competitors’ clients can check it. If your registration is lapsed or your company license is expired, that’s a problem today, not tomorrow.
Memphis is about to have a very uncomfortable conversation about how force gets used in this city. That conversation won’t stop at the walls of 201 Poplar. It’ll reach every guard shack, every patrol car, and every monitoring station in Shelby County.
The question for the private security industry isn’t whether this matters. It’s whether you’ll be ready when someone asks what you’ve done about it.