Memphis recorded 184 murders in 2025. That’s 65 fewer than 2024’s total of 249, a 26 percent drop year over year. It’s also the first time the city has finished below 200 since 2019, when the count was 190.
Those numbers come from the city’s Safer Communities Dashboard, published on January 2. MPD’s own figures, which count criminal homicides slightly differently from total homicides, put the number at roughly the same level. Either way you count it, 2025 was the least deadly year Memphis has seen in six years.
This is our annual crime review. We’ve published one every February since the site launched, always the last Thursday of the month, always grounded in the numbers rather than the narratives people want to impose on them. The numbers this year tell a clear story on the surface. Underneath, there’s more to argue about.
The Top-Line Numbers
Total homicides (including non-criminal) hit 235 for the year, according to the Safer Communities Dashboard. Criminal homicides, the number MPD emphasizes, came in at 184. The gap between those figures covers justifiable homicides, self-defense cases, and deaths still under investigation at year’s end.
Violent crime overall fell roughly 28 percent compared to 2024. That tracks with the homicide decline, though the individual categories moved at different rates. Aggravated assaults, which make up the bulk of violent crime in any city, dropped by a comparable margin. Robberies fell too, though reliable year-end numbers by category are still being finalized by MPD as of this writing.
Part 1 crimes, the FBI’s standard basket of serious offenses (homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft), showed the most dramatic movement in January 2026. MPD reported 1,908 Part 1 incidents in January, compared to 3,709 in January 2025. That’s a 48 percent reduction. January is one month, and it coincided with both the Memphis Safe Task Force operations and Winter Storm Fern, so extrapolating from it would be a mistake. Still, the number got people’s attention.
Auto theft remains the stubborn outlier. The Council on Criminal Justice noted in a January analysis that motor vehicle theft levels in Memphis during the first half of 2025 were still double what they were in the same period of 2019. The city has made progress, especially with targeted operations focused on Kia and Hyundai models that lack engine immobilizers. Progress and problem can coexist, and auto theft is where you see that most clearly.
Putting 184 in Context
The murder count matters, obviously. Every one of those 184 deaths is a person, a family wrecked, a neighborhood shaken. Reducing that number is worth celebrating in the restrained, unsentimental way that crime data deserves.
It also matters to put 184 in historical context.
Memphis hit 332 homicides in 2023. That was the peak of a surge that began around 2020, driven by a combination of pandemic disruption, policing pullbacks after the Tyre Nichols case and the disbanding of the SCORPION unit, and a national spike in gun violence that hit midsized Southern cities especially hard. From 332 to 184 in two years is a 44.5 percent decline. By any standard, that counts as a reversal.
Go further back, though, and the picture shifts. In 2014, Memphis recorded 135 homicides. In 2015, 161. The city’s five-year average from 2014 to 2018 was about 175. So 184 in 2025 puts Memphis roughly back to its pre-surge baseline, not below it. The city is not safer than it was a decade ago. It has recovered from a spike.
That distinction matters for anyone making security decisions based on “Memphis is getting safer.” Safer than 2023, absolutely. Safer than 2017? Not clearly. And the Council on Criminal Justice pointed out that even with the 2025 decline, Memphis homicides for the first half of the year were still 58 percent higher than the first half of 2019. Recovery is not the same as resolution.
What Drove the Decline
Three factors show up in every conversation about why Memphis crime dropped in 2025. The challenge is figuring out how much each one contributed.
The Memphis Safe Task Force. President Trump announced the task force on September 12, 2025, and operations inside city limits started later that month. By early January 2026, the task force had made nearly 5,000 arrests and seized close to 800 illegal firearms. The operation involved up to 1,000 National Guard troops (authorized through September 2026 by the Department of Defense), 13 federal agencies including the DEA, ATF, FBI, and U.S. Marshals, and MPD itself.
The task force’s arrest numbers are staggering by any local standard. Whether mass arrests translate to sustained crime reduction is a separate question, and one that federal law enforcement researchers have debated for decades. The early data from Memphis suggests a strong correlation between task force activity and the late-year crime decline, which accelerated after operations began in September.
Policing stabilization. After years of officer attrition following the Nichols case and the SCORPION disbandment, MPD’s staffing started to stabilize in 2025. The department didn’t hit its authorized strength, and likely won’t for years. Recruitment takes time, and Memphis is competing for cadets against suburban departments in Collierville, Bartlett, and Germantown that offer comparable pay with less dangerous assignments. Still, the bleeding slowed. Patrol coverage improved, and response times in several precincts came down.
Targeted strategies. MPD’s Real Time Crime Center, which became fully operational in 2024, gave the department better intelligence on where to deploy patrol and detective resources. The analytics aren’t magic, and anyone who’s sat through a Real Time Crime Center briefing knows the technology is only as good as the officers acting on the data. In 2025, the combination of better data and more stable staffing meant the department could actually execute on what the center identified.
The Neighborhood Picture
City-wide statistics flatten out a reality that is unevenly distributed across Memphis. The decline in violent crime was not felt equally in every zip code.
Whitehaven, Hickory Hill, and Frayser, the three neighborhoods that have carried disproportionate shares of the city’s violence for years, saw meaningful drops in 2025. Frayser in particular saw fewer shootings in the final quarter, a period that coincided directly with concentrated task force patrols in the area.
Midtown and the Medical District, which rarely make the violent crime lists in raw numbers, saw a different kind of crime concern: property crime, car break-ins, and package theft. A security director at one of the major hospitals along Union Avenue told me in December that their campus recorded more car break-in reports in 2025 than in 2024, even as the city’s violent crime numbers were falling. Property crime often moves independently from violent crime, and neighborhoods near commercial corridors and hospital campuses remain vulnerable.
Cordova and the Germantown border areas saw relatively stable numbers throughout the year. These are neighborhoods where private security patrols are common and where the existing police presence (both Shelby County and municipal departments) was already heavier per capita than in South Memphis or North Memphis.
The Task Force Question
The Memphis Safe Task Force is the largest variable in the 2025 data, and the hardest one to isolate.
The ACLU of Tennessee published a critique in early January 2026 arguing that the task force has subjected certain Memphis neighborhoods to “constant surveillance and the unending glare of blue lights.” Civil liberties organizations have raised concerns about the scope of the operation, the involvement of ICE agents (which creates fear in immigrant communities regardless of whether immigration enforcement is the task force’s focus), and the due process implications of mass arrest operations.
From a pure crime statistics perspective, the correlation between the task force and declining crime is hard to deny. Part 1 crimes fell 48 percent in January 2026 versus January 2025. That’s not a small movement. The question is whether the decline holds once the Guard leaves. The Department of Defense authorization runs through September 2026. After that, absent an extension, Memphis goes back to relying on MPD and the usual complement of federal agency field offices.
I’ve covered enough crime surges and crackdowns in this city to know the pattern: a surge in enforcement pushes crime down, the enforcement scales back, and the numbers drift upward again unless something structural has changed. The structural changes in Memphis, specifically the Real Time Crime Center, the Crime Prevention Grant program, and the stabilization of MPD staffing, are real. Whether they’re enough to maintain the gains without 1,000 National Guard troops on the streets is the question that will define 2026.
What the Private Security Industry Sees
For the companies providing security services across Shelby County, the crime decline creates a paradox. Lower crime should, in theory, reduce demand for their services. In practice, it hasn’t. Not yet.
Contract security companies in Memphis report that 2025 was their busiest year for new client inquiries. Part of that is the National Guard presence itself, which has heightened awareness of security as a concept. Business owners who see Humvees on Poplar Avenue start thinking about their own security posture. Property managers who read about the task force’s arrest numbers start asking whether their current provider is doing enough.
The other factor is insurance. Underwriters who set rates for commercial properties in Shelby County have been slow to adjust premiums downward in response to declining crime. The reasoning from the insurance side is simple: one year of improvement doesn’t reset a risk profile built on five years of elevated crime. Until premiums drop, the financial incentive to maintain or increase security spending stays in place.
What to Watch in 2026
If January’s numbers hold through the first quarter, Memphis will be on pace for its lowest annual crime figures in over a decade. That is a big if. January 2026 included both a major winter storm that kept people indoors for nearly a week and the heaviest period of task force operations to date. Neither of those conditions will persist through the spring and summer.
Historically, crime in Memphis follows a seasonal curve. March through September runs hotter than October through February. That pattern has held in every year I’ve tracked, including the anomalous pandemic years. If 2026 follows the curve, the March and April numbers will be the first real test of whether the decline has structural roots or was amplified by temporary factors.
The other variable is the federal courthouse. The task force’s nearly 5,000 arrests have flooded the federal court system. Public defenders are stretched thin. Docket backlogs are growing. If cases get dropped, pled down, or delayed indefinitely due to capacity issues, the arrest numbers will look good on paper while the real-world impact diminishes. We don’t have data on case disposition rates yet. By summer, we should.
For now, the headline is real. Memphis finished 2025 with 184 murders, down 26 percent from 2024 and the lowest count since 2019. That matters to every property owner, every business operator, and every resident in Shelby County. It also matters to the families of the 184 people who didn’t survive the year.
The number is lower. It isn’t low enough. It never is.