Twenty-two people were murdered in Memphis during the first three weeks of October. That number alone would be alarming in most American cities. In Memphis, it barely made the local news cycle.
We’re numb to it, and that’s part of the problem.
For property managers, business owners, and anyone responsible for keeping other people safe in Shelby County, the October numbers deserve more than a headline and a shrug. They reveal something the city-wide averages hide: a growing geographic split that should worry every security professional working east of the river.
March Set the Ceiling. October Is Testing It.
The worst month of 2023 was March, when Memphis recorded 39 homicides. That single month would rank as a full quarter’s worth of killings in cities twice our size. Since then, the monthly totals have bounced between the high teens and low thirties, never dropping to anything resembling safe.
October looks like it’ll land somewhere in the upper twenties when the final week closes out. For context, Memphis is currently on pace to challenge last year’s total of 346 homicides, and some projections put us closer to 380 or beyond. Nobody at MPD headquarters on Union Avenue is celebrating.
The year-to-date count tells part of the story. The precinct-level breakdown tells the rest.
Two Cities, One Zip Code
Pull up the MPD crime map and you’ll see something strange. The Appling Farms precinct in northeast Memphis has actually improved its numbers compared to the same period last year. Violent crime incidents are down. Property crime is trending lower. It’s one of the few genuine bright spots in the entire department’s data.
Now drive fifteen minutes south to the Raines Station precinct. Homicides there are up. Aggravated assaults are up. Carjackings, which became Memphis’s signature crime in 2022, remain stubbornly high across the Hickory Hill corridor.
The Tillman Station precinct covering Midtown and parts of the Medical District has seen mixed results. Some categories are flat. Others ticked upward. The overall picture is uneven enough that calling it “progress” would be generous, and calling it “failure” would be incomplete.
This is the fundamental challenge of reading Memphis crime data in 2023. The city-wide numbers suggest a crisis that’s roughly as bad as last year, maybe slightly worse. Drill down by precinct and you find pockets of real improvement sitting next to areas where things are falling apart.
What’s Different About the Precincts That Improved?
I put this question to three people who work in Memphis law enforcement, two active and one retired. None wanted their names in print, which tells you something about the current climate at MPD.
The consensus answer was staffing. Precincts with better retention rates are seeing better outcomes. That sounds obvious, and it is. The less obvious part is why some precincts kept their officers while others hemorrhaged them.
Geography matters. Officers who work precincts in Cordova, Bartlett-adjacent areas, and the Appling Farms corridor tend to live nearby. Their commute is shorter. Their families feel safer. They’re less likely to jump to a suburban department or leave policing altogether.
Officers assigned to South Memphis, Whitehaven, and Frayser face longer commutes if they live in the suburbs (and most do). They work higher-stress calls with fewer backup units available. When Southaven PD or Collierville PD comes recruiting with better pay and lower call volume, the math gets easy.
MPD’s staffing crisis didn’t start in 2023. It accelerated. Chief CJ Davis has been candid about the department being hundreds of officers short of its authorized strength. The SCORPION unit’s disbandment in January removed one of the department’s most active street-level forces, and nothing has replaced it in terms of proactive patrol coverage.
The SCORPION Shadow
You can’t discuss 2023 crime trends in Memphis without acknowledging the elephant. SCORPION was disbanded on January 28 after the death of Tyre Nichols. Five former officers face federal and state charges. The Department of Justice opened a pattern-or-practice investigation into MPD on July 27. That investigation is ongoing with no timeline for completion.
The practical effect on policing has been real. Officers I’ve spoken with describe a department that’s cautious in ways it wasn’t before. Traffic stops, which SCORPION conducted aggressively, have decreased across the board. Proactive enforcement, meaning officers initiating contact rather than responding to 911 calls, has slowed.
Some of that caution is appropriate. The Nichols case exposed tactics and a unit culture that crossed clear lines. The reforms the city has enacted, including the Driving Equality Act passed this spring restricting pretextual traffic stops, reflect legitimate policy corrections.
The tension is that those corrections coincide with a period of rising violence. Correlation isn’t causation. Less aggressive policing doesn’t automatically mean more crime. Dozens of variables feed into homicide rates: poverty, drug markets, gang conflicts, domestic violence, the availability of firearms, summer heat. Pointing at any single factor and saying “that’s the reason” is lazy analysis.
Still, the timing creates a narrative that’s politically potent and operationally paralyzing. Officers feel watched. Commanders feel constrained. And people in Parkway Village and Orange Mound keep dying.
Business Crime: A Different Kind of Surge
While homicides grab headlines, the numbers that should concern commercial property managers are in a different column. Business burglaries in Memphis went from roughly 180 in early 2022 to nearly 600 by spring 2023, a year-over-year increase so steep it looks like a data entry error. It isn’t.
DA Steve Mulroy announced a retail crime partnership with MPD back in April, acknowledging that organized theft rings were hitting Memphis businesses harder than at any point in recent memory. Wolfchase Galleria, the shopping centers along Germantown Parkway, and retail corridors in East Memphis have all seen increases.
Auto theft remains the volume leader. Kia and Hyundai models continue getting stolen at absurd rates thanks to the social media “challenge” that taught teenagers how to bypass their ignition systems with a USB cable. Memphis has been one of the hardest-hit cities nationally for that particular trend.
For anyone managing commercial property in Shelby County, the question isn’t whether to invest more in security. The question is how much, and where to put it.
What the Data Doesn’t Show
Crime statistics measure reported incidents. They don’t measure fear. They don’t measure the business owner in Whitehaven who stopped calling police because response times stretched past an hour. They don’t measure the Frayser resident who installed her own camera system because she doesn’t trust anyone else to protect her block.
The gap between reported crime and experienced crime has always existed. In 2023, I suspect that gap is wider than usual. When confidence in the police department drops, reporting drops with it. The numbers we’re analyzing may actually undercount the problem.
This is the part of the conversation that data-driven analysis tends to skip. Memphis’s crime problem isn’t just a policing problem or a prosecution problem. It’s a trust problem. The Nichols case damaged that trust profoundly, and the DOJ investigation, necessary as it is, keeps the wound open.
Reading the Rest of the Year
We have roughly nine weeks left in 2023. If the current pace holds, Memphis will likely finish somewhere between 360 and 400 homicides. Either number would be devastating. Neither would be surprising.
The precinct-level disparities I’ve outlined aren’t going to resolve themselves by December. Areas with stable staffing will continue doing better. Areas without it won’t. The math is that simple and that grim.
For security professionals reading this, the actionable takeaway is geographic. Know your precinct. Know its trends. Know whether MPD response times in your area are getting better or worse, because that determines how much your private security investment needs to compensate.
The monthly reports from MPD are public. The CompStat data is available. If you’re making security decisions for a Memphis property and you haven’t looked at your precinct’s numbers this quarter, you’re guessing. Stop guessing.
Memphis has been through bad years before. 2023 is shaping up to be one of the worst. The difference between surviving it and getting swallowed by it comes down to preparation, information, and refusing to look away from what the numbers actually say.