Memphis has always had a complicated relationship with its crime statistics. Every few years, the numbers drop enough for city leaders to talk about progress. Then something shifts, and the conversations change. In 2020, the shift was violent, sustained, and unlike anything in the city’s modern history.
By December 31, Memphis Police Department had recorded 290 murders. Total homicides, which include justifiable killings, reached 332. For a city of roughly 650,000, those numbers translate to a murder rate that puts Memphis among the deadliest cities in America. Not per capita. In raw count, too.
In 2019, Memphis recorded 190 murders. That means 2020 saw a 53% increase in a single year. Understanding why that happened isn’t just an academic exercise. For anyone working in private security, law enforcement, or property management in the Memphis metro, the forces behind that surge are still active. They haven’t resolved. They’ve carried right into 2021.
The COVID Effect
You can’t talk about 2020 crime in any American city without starting with COVID-19. The pandemic didn’t cause people to commit murder. What it did was disrupt every system designed to prevent and respond to violence.
Courts shut down in March and barely reopened for months. Shelby County Criminal Court had a backlog that stretched into thousands of cases by summer. People who would have been in jail awaiting trial were released or never booked. The deterrent effect of the criminal justice system, the idea that you’ll face consequences, weakened when the system visibly stopped functioning.
MPD pulled officers off community policing assignments to handle pandemic-related calls. Temperature checkpoints, business compliance checks, and crowd dispersal at parks and public spaces ate into patrol hours. The department was already running short. COVID made it worse.
Economic stress hit Memphis’s poorest neighborhoods hardest. Unemployment spiked above 15% in Shelby County during the spring. Federal stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits helped, but they didn’t reach everyone and they didn’t last. The underground economy, including drug sales and other illegal income sources, fills gaps that legal employment leaves open. When legal jobs disappear, those gaps widen.
Schools closed. For teenagers in neighborhoods where gang recruitment is active, school provides structure, supervision, and a daily reason to be somewhere other than the street. Remote learning worked for families with reliable internet and a parent at home. In Frayser and Orange Mound, that described a fraction of households.
The Summer of Unrest
George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis on May 25 triggered protests across the country. Memphis was no exception. Demonstrations in late May and early June were largely peaceful, though some resulted in property damage downtown and along Poplar Avenue. The protests themselves didn’t directly drive the murder numbers. What they did was strain an already stretched police force and, in some neighborhoods, widen the gap between residents and law enforcement.
MPD officers working 12-hour protest shifts weren’t available for patrol. Overtime budgets blew past projections. Morale, which was already low, dropped further as officers faced public anger over policing practices they felt weren’t specific to Memphis.
The broader conversation about police reform also affected recruiting. MPD was already struggling to fill its authorized strength of roughly 2,400 officers. By the end of 2020, sworn officer count had fallen below 2,000. Some officers retired. Others left for departments in surrounding suburbs where the pay was comparable and the job felt less dangerous. A few resigned outright, citing burnout.
Fewer officers on the street, combined with rising violence, created a feedback loop. Residents in high-crime areas saw less police presence, felt less safe, and in some cases took matters into their own hands. Retaliatory shootings don’t show up in crime statistics as a separate category. They show up as another murder.
Neighborhood by Neighborhood
The 290 murders weren’t distributed evenly across Memphis. They concentrated in neighborhoods that have struggled with violence for years, and they hit some areas harder than anyone expected.
Whitehaven, the south Memphis community that includes Graceland and Elvis Presley Boulevard, saw a sharp increase in shootings. Strip malls along Shelby Drive and the residential blocks between Winchester and Holmes Road accounted for multiple homicides. Whitehaven has a mix of working-class homeowners and rental properties that have deteriorated over the past decade. The area’s proximity to the Mississippi state line also creates a jurisdictional challenge for police.
Frayser, in north Memphis, has been one of the city’s most violent zip codes for years. 2020 didn’t change that ranking, though the raw numbers climbed. The stretch of Thomas Street and the area around Ed Rice Community Center saw repeated incidents. Frayser’s challenges are structural: high poverty, limited commercial investment, and a housing stock that includes large numbers of abandoned properties.
Raleigh, northeast of Frayser, experienced similar patterns. The Austin Peay Highway corridor, once a thriving commercial strip, has seen declining foot traffic and increasing crime. Several homicides occurred in and around apartment complexes along Stage Road.
Orange Mound, one of Memphis’s historically significant neighborhoods east of downtown, recorded multiple homicides in a community already dealing with disinvestment. The area around Lamar Avenue and Park Avenue saw several incidents in the second half of the year.
Hickory Hill, in southeast Memphis near the intersection of Hickory Hill Road and Winchester, has been a flashpoint for crime for several years. The neighborhood’s large apartment complexes and dense population create conditions where disputes escalate quickly. 2020 intensified every one of those conditions.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has studied Memphis crime maps: violence clusters in areas with high poverty, low employment, aging housing, and limited access to services. COVID didn’t create those conditions. It made every one of them worse.
MPD’s Staffing Crisis
Director Michael Rallings has been open about the department’s staffing problem, and he should be, because it’s impossible to hide. Memphis authorized roughly 2,400 sworn officer positions. The actual count at the end of 2020 was somewhere below 2,000, depending on which numbers you use and whether you count officers on leave or in administrative roles.
That gap has real-world effects. Precincts can’t fill all shifts. Specialized units get pulled to handle patrol duties. Detectives carry case loads that would be unmanageable even at full staffing. The homicide clearance rate, the percentage of murders where someone is arrested and charged, has declined alongside the staffing numbers. When murders don’t get solved, the deterrent effect weakens and retaliatory violence increases.
Rallings’ contract expires in April 2021. Whoever leads MPD after that, whether it’s Rallings with a new contract or someone else, will inherit a department that needs hundreds of new officers and doesn’t have a clear path to recruiting them. Starting pay for an MPD officer is roughly $37,000. Surrounding departments in Germantown, Collierville, and Bartlett offer comparable or better pay with significantly lower call volumes and risk.
What Security Professionals Should Take From 2020
The 2020 numbers aren’t just a law enforcement story. They’re a market signal for the private security industry.
When public safety systems strain, private security fills the gaps. That happened throughout 2020 in Memphis, with property managers adding guard posts, HOAs hiring patrol services, and businesses requesting armed officers they never thought they’d need. That trend accelerated in the fourth quarter as crime numbers made national news.
The neighborhoods that saw the worst violence are also neighborhoods where commercial property owners are most likely to invest in private security. A convenience store owner on Elvis Presley Boulevard who watched three shootings happen within a block of his store in 2020 doesn’t need convincing that he needs a guard. He needs someone who can actually staff the post.
Understanding the geographic concentration of crime matters for security companies making operational decisions. Where you deploy your best-trained officers, where you invest in surveillance technology, and which client proposals you prioritize should all be informed by where the violence is happening.
The staffing crisis at MPD is the private security industry’s opportunity and its warning. Opportunity because reduced police presence drives demand for private services. Warning because the same labor market forces that prevent MPD from hiring 400 officers also prevent security companies from hiring qualified guards. If the police department can’t compete for talent at $37,000 a year, a security company paying $11 an hour faces an even steeper climb.
The Numbers Aren’t Going Back
Nobody I’ve spoken with in law enforcement, criminal justice, or the security industry expects Memphis to snap back to 2019 levels in 2021. The conditions that drove the surge, including a pandemic that’s still raging, courts that are still backed up, a police force that’s still short-staffed, and economic strain that hasn’t lifted, are all carrying into the new year.
Memphis has survived bad years before. The crack epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s brought similar violence. The city recovered, though recovery took years and required sustained investment in policing, community programs, and economic development.
What 2020 proved is that progress isn’t permanent. A city can spend a decade bringing crime numbers down and lose those gains in twelve months. For everyone working in security in this city, that’s the lesson that should shape decisions in 2021 and beyond. The 290 number isn’t a data point to cite in a report. It’s the reality that 290 families in Memphis are living with right now.