A woman was carjacked at gunpoint at Wolfchase Galleria on a Tuesday afternoon in July. She was walking to her car with shopping bags. Two teenagers, one holding a pistol, took her keys and drove off in her SUV. She wasn’t hurt physically. MPD took the report. The local news ran the story for one cycle. By Thursday, it was gone from the headlines.
It wasn’t gone from the property manager’s inbox.
Memphis posted the highest robbery rate of any major U.S. city in the first half of 2023, at 231.5 incidents per 100,000 residents. Carjackings, which the FBI categorizes under robbery, made up a growing share of that number. And the locations where they kept happening told a clear story: parking lots. Retail centers. Grocery stores. Gas stations. The places where people have their keys out, their attention divided, and their vehicles running.
For commercial property owners in Shelby County, this creates a problem with a price tag on both sides. Pay for parking lot security and absorb the cost. Or don’t pay, and absorb the liability when the next carjacking makes the news with your property’s name attached to it.
The Geography of the Problem
Carjackings in Memphis don’t distribute evenly across the map. They cluster around commercial corridors where high foot traffic meets easy highway access. The stretch of Germantown Parkway from Dexter Road to Trinity Road has been a persistent trouble spot. The Poplar Avenue corridor between Highland and Perkins draws incidents because of the density of restaurants, shops, and office buildings with large parking lots. Hickory Hill’s commercial areas around Winchester and Mendenhall see regular auto crime.
Wolfchase Galleria comes up repeatedly in police reports, partly because it’s the largest enclosed mall remaining in the Memphis metro and partly because its parking lot covers approximately 100 acres. That’s a lot of asphalt to patrol. The lot has multiple entry and exit points connecting to Germantown Parkway, Stage Road, and North Germantown Parkway, which gives anyone trying to leave quickly several options.
Juveniles have been heavily represented in carjacking arrests throughout 2023. MPD has charged suspects as young as 12 and 13 in auto theft and carjacking cases. In multiple incidents, stolen vehicles were used to commit additional crimes. This pattern has driven a separate conversation about juvenile justice in Shelby County, and the security implications are real: traditional deterrence assumptions don’t apply the same way when the offenders are middle-schoolers who may not fully weigh the consequences of a felony charge.
What Parking Lot Security Actually Costs
Here’s where property owners start doing math on napkins and not liking the answers.
A single unarmed security guard on a parking lot patrol shift in Memphis runs roughly $12 to $13 per hour in contract fees. For a standard retail center that wants coverage from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. (the peak hours for parking lot crime at retail locations), that’s $144 to $156 per day. Monthly, you’re looking at $4,320 to $4,680.
Twelve-hour coverage isn’t enough for a property that’s experienced incidents. Many retail centers and shopping plazas that have had carjackings or armed robberies in their lots extend coverage to 24 hours. That doubles the cost to roughly $8,640 to $9,360 per month, per guard. A single guard patrolling a large lot with multiple ingress points.
Armed guard coverage, increasingly requested along the Germantown Parkway commercial corridor and in East Memphis, runs $15 to $17 per hour. The same 24-hour post costs $10,800 to $12,240 per month.
For a large retail center with parking across multiple areas, you might need two or three concurrent posts to provide meaningful coverage. Annual costs for serious parking lot security at a major retail property can easily exceed $150,000.
Compare that to what a carjacking lawsuit costs. A single violent incident on commercial property where the owner provided no security can generate civil liability claims in the six-figure to low-seven-figure range. The legal theory is straightforward: if a property owner knows (or should know) about a pattern of criminal activity and fails to take reasonable security measures, they can be liable for injuries that result.
Tennessee courts have upheld premises liability claims in parking lot crime cases. The standard is whether the property owner acted reasonably given known risks. In a city with Memphis’s crime statistics, “we didn’t know” is an increasingly difficult defense.
The Camera Question
Cameras are cheaper than guards. That’s obvious. A commercial-grade surveillance system covering a medium-size parking lot runs $15,000 to $30,000 installed, with annual monitoring and maintenance costs of $2,000 to $5,000. Compared to $50,000 or more per year for a single guard post, the economics seem clear.
The problem is that cameras don’t stop carjackings. They record them. A camera system gives you footage to hand to MPD detectives. It gives your insurance company documentation. It gives your attorney evidence that you took some security measures. All of those things have value.
None of them help the person being carjacked at 3 p.m. on a Saturday.
Memphis’s own experience with surveillance supports this. The city’s Connect 2 Memphis camera program has expanded significantly, with hundreds of cameras feeding into the Real Time Crime Center on Peabody Avenue. Those cameras have been instrumental in identifying suspects and solving crimes after they happen. They have not measurably deterred the crimes from happening in the first place. The RTCC is a reactive tool, and a good one. Deterrence requires something visible and present at the location.
The most effective parking lot security programs combine both: cameras for documentation and investigation support, physical patrol for deterrence. The cost of that combination is what makes property owners reach for the antacids.
What Other Cities Are Doing
Memphis isn’t the only city dealing with parking lot carjackings. Chicago, which had over 1,900 carjackings in 2021 (the number has declined since then), saw several major retailers and shopping centers invest heavily in parking lot security. The approaches varied.
Some properties added physical barriers: bollards at key entry points, speed bumps to slow vehicle movement, redesigned traffic flow patterns to eliminate easy escape routes. These are one-time capital expenditures, typically $20,000 to $50,000 depending on the property size, and they create meaningful friction for offenders who rely on quick exits.
Others invested in lighting. Criminal justice research consistently shows that improved lighting reduces property crime in parking structures and surface lots. The evidence is strong enough that some insurance carriers offer premium discounts for properties that meet specific illumination standards. Upgrading lighting across a major parking lot costs $10,000 to $40,000 depending on the existing infrastructure.
The lesson from Chicago and other high-carjacking cities is that no single measure solves the problem. The properties that have reduced incidents most effectively use layered approaches: lighting plus cameras plus periodic patrol plus physical design changes. Each layer adds cost. Each layer also reduces the property owner’s liability exposure incrementally.
The Tenant Pressure Dynamic
Property owners who are hesitant to spend on parking lot security are finding that their tenants aren’t giving them a choice. This dynamic is playing out across Memphis’s retail real estate market right now.
National retailers have security requirements written into their lease agreements. When a property experiences a pattern of violent crime in its common areas, including parking lots, tenants can invoke lease provisions related to safety and quiet enjoyment. Some leases include specific language allowing tenants to withhold rent or terminate early if the landlord fails to maintain safe conditions in common areas.
I’ve talked to commercial real estate brokers along the Poplar corridor who say parking lot crime is now coming up in every lease negotiation. Prospective tenants are asking about security measures before they ask about buildout allowances. One broker told me a restaurant group walked away from a prime East Memphis location after reviewing the police report data for the surrounding parking area.
The vacancy cost of losing a tenant over security concerns typically exceeds the annual cost of adding patrol coverage. A 3,000-square-foot retail bay on Germantown Parkway leasing at $22 per square foot represents $66,000 in annual rent. Losing that tenant and facing four months of vacancy to re-lease costs the property owner roughly $22,000 in lost income, plus the leasing commission for the replacement tenant. That’s more than a year of unarmed guard coverage at a single post.
The math isn’t ambiguous. Property owners just don’t like spending money on something that doesn’t generate revenue directly. Security is a cost center. Every dollar spent on parking lot patrol is a dollar that doesn’t go toward property improvements that attract tenants and raise rents.
What’s Not Being Said
Here’s the tension that runs beneath every conversation about parking lot security in Memphis: many property owners are quietly hoping that MPD will solve the carjacking problem so they don’t have to spend the money. They’re waiting for arrest numbers to rise, for juvenile crime policies to change, for the next police initiative to take effect.
That wait has cost some of them tenants, lawsuits, and higher insurance premiums.
MPD is dealing with its own capacity constraints. The department is roughly 400 officers below authorized strength. The DOJ pattern-or-practice investigation, announced in July, adds uncertainty about future policing approaches. Officers are handling priority calls. A property owner who calls about suspicious activity in a parking lot and expects a patrol car in under 20 minutes is often going to be disappointed.
The private security option isn’t perfect. Guards deter some crime, but they don’t eliminate it. Cameras document incidents but don’t prevent them. Physical barriers help but cost money upfront. Every measure is partial.
The question for Memphis property owners in September 2023 isn’t whether parking lot security is worth the investment. It’s whether they can afford the alternative. Based on the lawsuits, the lost tenants, and the insurance increases I’ve seen this year, the alternative is getting more expensive every quarter.
Nobody wants to pay for parking lot security. Increasingly, nobody can afford not to.