A woman pulls into the Mapco station on Poplar Avenue near Highland to get gas. It’s 7:15 on a Tuesday evening. Still daylight. She swipes her card, starts pumping, and a car rolls up behind her. Two teenagers jump out. One has a gun. They take her keys, her purse, and her 2019 Honda Accord. The whole thing takes about twenty seconds.
She’s unhurt. She’s also the third carjacking victim at that same gas station this year.
This is Memphis in June 2021. Carjackings are up roughly 40% compared to the same period last year, and last year was already bad. The people committing these crimes are getting younger. The locations are getting more brazen. And Memphis Police, already short-staffed and stretched across a city drowning in violent crime, can’t respond fast enough to change the trajectory.
The Numbers Tell a Brutal Story
Memphis has always had a car theft problem. That’s different from carjacking, and the distinction matters. Auto theft means someone steals your car when you’re not in it. From a parking lot, a driveway, a street. Carjacking means someone takes your car from you, face to face, usually with a weapon. It’s a violent crime. It’s personal. And it leaves victims shaken in ways that property crime doesn’t.
Through the first five months of 2021, Memphis Police Department data shows carjacking reports running about 40% above 2020 levels. The raw numbers are staggering for a city this size. We’re talking about multiple incidents per day across the metro area, concentrated in specific corridors and neighborhoods.
The Poplar Avenue corridor from Midtown east toward Germantown has been particularly hard hit. So has the Hickory Hill area in southeast Memphis. The Germantown Parkway shopping district, Wolfchase Galleria and the surrounding retail, sees regular incidents. Even Southaven, just across the Mississippi border, has reported a spillover of Memphis-style carjackings at its shopping centers.
Gas stations are ground zero. Mapco, Exxon, Shell. The brand doesn’t matter. What matters is that the victim is outside their vehicle, distracted, and alone. The University of Memphis area has seen clusters of incidents near campus, particularly in the evenings when students are coming and going from off-campus apartments.
Who’s Doing This?
Here’s the part that makes law enforcement and prosecutors pull their hair out: a huge percentage of Memphis carjackings are being committed by juveniles. Kids under 18. Some as young as 13 or 14.
They work in groups of two to four, typically using a car that was itself stolen in a previous carjacking or auto theft. They pick targets at gas stations, fast food drive-throughs, parking lots, and residential driveways. One person drives, one or two approach the victim, and the confrontation is fast and violent. Guns are almost always involved.
The juvenile issue creates a cascade of problems in the justice system. Tennessee law treats juvenile offenders differently than adults, and for good reason in most cases. A 14-year-old who steals a candy bar shouldn’t face adult prosecution. A 14-year-old who puts a gun in someone’s face and takes their car is a different situation entirely, and the system struggles with where to draw that line.
Juvenile offenders who are apprehended often cycle through detention quickly. Judges face legal limits on how long they can hold minors. Families sometimes can’t or won’t supervise released juveniles effectively. The same kids show up in carjacking investigations again and again.
“We arrest them on Tuesday, they’re out on Thursday, and they carjack someone else on Saturday,” one MPD officer told me. He’s been on the force for eleven years and said this stretch is the most frustrated he’s ever been. “The system isn’t built for this.”
What It Feels Like on the Ground
Numbers are abstract. The fear is concrete.
I talked to a dozen Memphis residents over the past two weeks about how carjackings have changed their daily routines. Every single one described specific behavioral changes they’ve made.
A nurse who works nights at Methodist Hospital said she now has her husband follow her to the gas station on Lamar Avenue so she doesn’t have to pump gas alone. “I won’t stop by myself after dark. Period. I’ll drive home on fumes before I’ll stop at a gas station alone at eleven at night.”
A small business owner in the University area told me he stopped going through the Wendy’s drive-through on Highland after a carjacking happened there in April. “I used to grab lunch three times a week. Now I don’t go near drive-throughs. I eat at my desk.”
A college student living near the U of M campus said three people in her apartment complex had been carjacked since January. Three. In one complex. She carries pepper spray and parks as close to her building entrance as possible, even if it means circling the lot for ten minutes.
These aren’t people who live in constant panic. They’re making calculated adjustments to avoid situations where they might be vulnerable. That’s what sustained violent crime does to a city. It reorganizes daily life around threat avoidance.
MPD’s Response: A Task Force With Limited Resources
Memphis Police formed a carjacking task force earlier this year, pulling detectives and officers from other units to focus on the surge. The task force has made arrests. They’ve recovered stolen vehicles. They’ve identified repeat offenders and taken some off the street.
The problem is scale. MPD has about 2,000 sworn officers to cover a city of 650,000 people spread across 324 square miles. That’s already below the national average for officers per capita in cities this size. Factor in vacations, sick days, training requirements, and administrative assignments, and the number of officers actually on patrol at any given time is significantly lower.
Response times tell the story. In some precincts, non-emergency calls, which is how many carjacking reports are classified after the fact, wait 30 minutes or more for an officer. By the time police arrive at a gas station where someone’s car was just taken, the suspects are long gone. The stolen vehicle might turn up days later, abandoned in a different part of the city, or it might be used in another crime before it’s recovered.
The task force approach puts focused pressure on known offenders and hot spots. That helps. What it can’t do is put an officer at every gas station and parking lot in Memphis simultaneously. The math doesn’t work.
What Businesses Are Doing
Private security is filling gaps that police can’t cover. That’s been true in Memphis for years, and the carjacking surge is accelerating the trend.
Shopping centers along Germantown Parkway have increased security patrol hours in their parking lots, particularly during evening hours. Some have added guards on foot who walk the lots continuously during peak shopping times rather than sitting in a vehicle near the entrance.
Gas station owners along the Poplar corridor and in Hickory Hill are investing in better lighting and higher-resolution camera systems. Cameras don’t prevent carjackings in the moment, but they provide footage that helps investigators identify suspects and build cases. Several gas station owners told me they’ve submitted camera footage to MPD multiple times this year.
A few property management companies that operate shopping centers and office parks in East Memphis have hired armed security specifically because of carjacking concerns. The thinking is that a visible armed presence in a parking lot changes the calculation for would-be carjackers, who generally look for easy, unguarded targets.
Parking garages present their own challenges. The garage at Laurelwood Shopping Center, the structures near the medical district, the garages serving office buildings on Poplar. These enclosed spaces create blind spots and limited escape routes for victims. Some garages have added security patrols that walk each level every 15-20 minutes during business hours.
Corporate tenants in East Memphis office parks are asking their landlords pointed questions about parking security. Several companies have adjusted their own schedules, discouraging employees from working late alone or requiring buddy systems for anyone leaving the building after dark.
The Juvenile Justice Debate
Memphis is having a version of a conversation that’s happening in cities across the country: what do you do when the people committing violent crimes are children?
Shelby County’s juvenile court system was already strained before the carjacking surge. Now it’s handling a steady stream of cases involving armed teenagers who, in some instances, have been arrested for carjacking multiple times. The court has limited options. Long-term detention for juveniles requires meeting specific legal thresholds. Rehabilitation programs have waiting lists. Community supervision depends on family structures that are sometimes absent.
Prosecutors push for transfer to adult court in the most serious cases — repeat offenders, incidents involving injuries, suspects close to 18. Those transfers happen, but they’re the exception. The majority of juvenile carjacking cases move through a system designed with different assumptions about what kind of offenses young people commit.
None of this is unique to Memphis. St. Louis, New Orleans, Chicago, and other cities are wrestling with identical dynamics. The common threads are juvenile offenders, stolen cars, guns, and a justice system that wasn’t built for this volume of violent juvenile crime.
What Isn’t Working
Telling people to “be aware of their surroundings” doesn’t stop carjackings. That advice gets repeated after every incident, and it’s not wrong — awareness helps. It’s just insufficient. The woman at the Mapco on Poplar was aware of her surroundings. She saw the car pull up. She still couldn’t get back in her vehicle and lock the doors before two armed teenagers were on her.
Steering wheel clubs and GPS trackers help with vehicle recovery after the fact. They don’t prevent the violent confrontation.
The only things that reliably reduce carjackings are the same things that reduce all violent crime: consistent policing presence, swift prosecution of offenders, adequate detention or supervision for repeat offenders, and long-term investment in the communities producing the offenders. None of those are quick fixes. None of them are cheap.
Heading Into Summer
Memphis summers are historically the worst months for violent crime, and there’s no reason to expect 2021 to break that pattern. More people outside, more hours of activity, school’s out, and teenagers with nothing constructive to do — it’s a recipe for continued problems.
The carjacking task force will keep making arrests. Security companies will keep getting calls from business owners and property managers who want more coverage. Gas station owners will keep upgrading their cameras and lights. And Memphis residents will keep adjusting their daily routines to avoid becoming the next victim.
I wish I had a more hopeful conclusion. The honest assessment is that this problem is going to get worse before it gets better, and “better” is a long way off. Memphis needs more police officers, a juvenile justice system with more capacity and sharper teeth, and the kind of sustained community investment that takes years to show results.
In the meantime, people are afraid to stop for gas. That’s where we are.
Marcus Johnson covers crime and public safety in Memphis. Contact him at tips@memphissecurityinsider.com.