“We will make Memphis safe,” Paul Young told a crowd at the Orpheum Theatre on January 1, 2024, minutes after being sworn in as the city’s 66th mayor. He didn’t qualify the promise. Didn’t hedge it with “over time” or “within available resources.” He said it flat, like a man who understood that his political future depended on whether people believed him.
One year later, the numbers suggest he delivered. Crime fell 13% across the board. Homicides dropped from 397 to 296, a 30% decline. Motor vehicle thefts plummeted 39%. Downtown crime declined 26.4%. By nearly every metric that criminologists and police departments use to measure public safety, Memphis had a better 2024 than anyone had a right to expect.
And yet. Talk to residents in Orange Mound or Whitehaven. Walk through the parking lot at Wolfchase Galleria at closing time. Sit in on a neighborhood association meeting in Berclair. The mood doesn’t match the data. Memphis got measurably safer, and a lot of Memphians don’t buy it.
That gap between statistics and sentiment is where the city’s real public safety challenge lives. And it’s where the private security industry sits right in the middle.
Three Days In
Young didn’t waste time. Three days after his inauguration, he announced a public safety task force bringing together MPD leadership, city council members, and community representatives. The message was clear: this administration would be defined by its crime numbers, and the clock started immediately.
The early moves were tactical. Young backed MPD Chief CJ Davis and her emphasis on the Real Time Crime Center, which uses networked cameras and license plate readers across the city to track criminal activity in real time. He pushed for expansion of the Connect 2 Memphis camera registration program, which lets businesses and homeowners link their private surveillance systems to MPD’s intelligence network.
Operation Code Zero, the department’s targeted enforcement initiative, received public support and additional resources from the mayor’s office. The operation focuses on high-crime corridors and uses data-driven patrol deployment rather than static beat assignments. Officers are shifted to the areas and time windows where data indicates the highest probability of violent crime.
These are evidence-based policing strategies. They’re also strategies that require sustained political will and funding to maintain. Young provided both in year one. The question is whether the momentum continues into year two, especially as the city faces budget pressures from infrastructure needs and pension obligations.
The Numbers in Context
The 30% homicide reduction is striking, and it should be put in proper context. Memphis was coming off a historically awful baseline. The 397 homicides in 2023 were near the city’s all-time peak. A return toward pre-2020 levels was statistically likely even without aggressive intervention.
That’s not to diminish what happened. Memphis outperformed the national trend. Cities across the country saw modest crime declines in 2024, typically in the 5% to 8% range. Memphis’s 13% overall decline and 30% homicide drop exceeded that by a wide margin. Something local was working.
The downtown numbers are particularly relevant for the business community. A 26.4% drop in crime within the downtown core reflects both increased policing and the gradual return of foot traffic that makes an area self-policing. More people on the street means more witnesses, which means less opportunity for the kinds of crimes that thrive in empty spaces.
Construction of a new downtown command center near Peabody Place is underway. The facility will give MPD a dedicated operational hub in the heart of the entertainment and business district. When it opens, it will put officers minutes closer to the highest-density areas of downtown. For the private security teams already working Beale Street, the convention center, and the hotels along Union Avenue, having MPD command presence that close should improve coordination and response times.
The Perception Gap
Here’s where the story gets complicated. Crime data measures incidents. It doesn’t measure how a person feels walking to their car after a late shift at Methodist South. It doesn’t capture the anxiety of a mother in Frayser who won’t let her kids play in the front yard after dark, regardless of what the statistics say.
Memphis has spent years building a reputation as a dangerous city. National media coverage, viral social media posts showing carjackings and armed robberies, and the lingering trauma of the Tyre Nichols case have created an image that a single year of improved statistics cannot undo.
I talked to four Memphis residents in different parts of the city this past week. All four were aware that crime had declined. None of them said they felt meaningfully safer.
A restaurant manager on Broad Avenue told me she still makes her staff walk to their cars together after closing. “The numbers are great,” she said. “I’ll celebrate when I stop worrying about my people getting to their cars.”
A property manager responsible for a portfolio of commercial buildings in the Poplar-Highland area said his tenants hadn’t changed their security spending based on the crime data. “They read the same headlines everyone else does. One bad incident at one of my properties and I’ll be explaining why we cut the guard budget. Nobody wants to be the person who made that call.”
That reluctance to reduce security despite improving statistics is a dynamic the private security industry knows well. Fear is stickier than data. A single high-profile incident can reset the public’s perception overnight, regardless of the trendlines.
What’s Working and What Isn’t
The Real Time Crime Center is working. The evidence is in the case clearance rates and the speed of suspect identification. When MPD can pull camera footage within minutes of a shooting and distribute suspect descriptions to patrol officers in real time, the entire enforcement cycle accelerates.
Connect 2 Memphis is working in the areas where participation is high. Downtown, Midtown, and parts of East Memphis have strong camera registration rates. The program is less effective in neighborhoods where businesses either don’t have camera systems or don’t trust the police enough to share access.
Operation Code Zero has produced arrests, though the long-term deterrent effect is harder to measure. Targeted enforcement operations tend to suppress crime in specific areas for specific periods. Whether that suppression becomes permanent depends on whether the underlying conditions that produce crime (poverty, lack of economic opportunity, housing instability) are addressed alongside the policing.
What isn’t working, or at least isn’t working fast enough, is the public communication piece. Young’s administration has been better than his predecessor at getting crime data out to the public. The mayor’s social media accounts regularly post statistics and highlight positive trends. MPD’s public information office has been more active and responsive.
Still, the data isn’t reaching the people who need to hear it most. The residents of neighborhoods with the highest crime rates are also the least likely to follow the mayor’s Twitter account or read a Memphis Business Journal article about public safety improvements. The message is getting to the business community and the media. It’s not getting to the grandmother in Parkway Village who heard gunshots last Tuesday and doesn’t care what the aggregate numbers say.
Private Security’s Place in the Equation
The relationship between MPD and the private security industry in Memphis has always been informal and sometimes awkward. Police departments and private security companies occupy overlapping territory, and there’s occasional friction over jurisdiction, professionalism, and accountability.
Under Young’s administration, the relationship has been more cooperative than adversarial. The Real Time Crime Center accepts camera feeds from private security systems through Connect 2 Memphis. MPD has participated in industry events organized by the Tennessee Association of Licensed Security Officers. There’s at least a tacit acknowledgment that the roughly 8,000 to 10,000 private security officers working in the Memphis metro area are part of the public safety apparatus, even if they aren’t on the city payroll.
For security companies, this creates both opportunity and responsibility. The opportunity is in positioning private security as a complement to MPD’s efforts. When a property owner can tell their insurance carrier that their security program integrates with MPD’s real-time surveillance network, that carries weight.
The responsibility is in maintaining standards that justify the partnership. Every unlicensed guard, every falsified patrol report, every poorly trained officer who escalates a situation that should have been defused undermines the credibility of the entire industry. TDCI’s increased enforcement activity in 2024 suggests the state is paying attention. Companies that cut corners are borrowing time.
The State of the City
Mayor Young is scheduled to deliver his first State of the City address on January 31. Public safety will be the centerpiece. The 2024 crime numbers give him a strong story to tell, and he’ll tell it.
The harder message is the one about sustainability. One good year doesn’t make a trend. Memphis has seen crime dip before, only to spike again when resources shifted, leadership changed, or external factors intervened. The crack epidemic of the late 1980s, the post-recession crime spike of 2010-2012, the pandemic-era surge of 2020-2022: Memphis has a pattern of improvement followed by regression.
Breaking that pattern requires more than policing. It requires the economic development that Young has championed (he was the city’s chief development officer before becoming mayor), the infrastructure investment that keeps neighborhoods viable, and the educational and employment pathways that give young men in Frayser and Orange Mound something to do besides what lands them in the crime statistics.
The private security industry benefits either way. If crime continues to decline, companies pivot toward technology, compliance, and risk management services that justify their value in a lower-threat environment. If crime rebounds, demand for traditional guard services holds or increases. The industry is, in a cynical reading, recession-proof against crime trends.
A less cynical reading: the industry is most valuable when it contributes to sustained safety rather than just responding to fear. The companies that align their services with what Young’s administration is trying to build (a safer, more monitored, more data-driven Memphis) will be positioned to grow regardless of what the next year’s crime report says.
Young promised to make Memphis safe. Year one delivered numbers that back up the promise. Year two will show whether the improvement sticks, whether the perception gap narrows, and whether the city can break its historical pattern of two steps forward and one step back.
The State of the City speech will be full of optimism. The real answer won’t come from a podium. It’ll come from whether that restaurant manager on Broad Avenue eventually stops worrying about her staff walking to their cars.