Two hundred and thirty. That’s the number Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings confirmed on Tuesday, September 29. It means the city has already surpassed its all-time annual homicide record of 228, set back in 2016. Three full months remain in 2020.
For anyone managing a property, running a business, or raising a family in Shelby County, that number is more than a statistic. It’s a signal that the safety calculus has changed, and changed fast. The previous record took a full twelve months to set. This one fell before the leaves did.
A Year Like No Other
The obvious question is why. And while there’s no single answer, the factors stacking up in 2020 are hard to ignore.
Start with COVID-19. When the pandemic shut Memphis down in March, it closed more than restaurants and churches. It closed the criminal courts in Shelby County. Cases backed up. People who would normally be behind bars were released early or never booked at all. The Shelby County jail, already overcrowded, started reducing its population to limit virus spread. By summer, defense attorneys were reporting cases delayed by six months or more.
Then came the economic collapse. Memphis already carried one of the highest poverty rates among major American cities before the pandemic hit. When businesses closed and unemployment checks ran dry, the pressure in neighborhoods that were already struggling got worse. The stretch of Elvis Presley Boulevard through Whitehaven, once lined with open storefronts, went quiet. Unemployment in Shelby County peaked above 15% in April and May. It has come down since, but not enough, and not everywhere.
And policing changed. Not just in Memphis, though the George Floyd protests in late May and June forced a national reckoning. In Memphis, MPD officers reported lower morale. Retirements ticked up. Rallings acknowledged in a July press conference that officers were exhausted, working extra shifts to cover gaps in staffing while also responding to protests and demonstrations downtown.
The Neighborhoods Carrying the Weight
The violence hasn’t been evenly distributed. It never is.
Frayser, the 38127 zip code north of the Wolf River, has been one of the hardest hit areas all year. By midsummer, the neighborhood had already recorded more homicides than it saw in all of 2019. Residents along Thomas Street and Overton Crossing have described a summer of gunfire that started in May and hasn’t let up. Community groups in Frayser have organized marches and vigils, yet the shootings keep coming.
Hickory Hill, on the city’s southeast side, tells a similar story. The area around Winchester Road and Riverdale has seen a concentration of shootings that’s strained the already thin police presence in the precinct. A strip mall on Hickory Hill Road where a man was killed in August still has plywood over the front window.
Whitehaven and Orange Mound have both recorded sharp increases. In Orange Mound, a neighborhood with deep historical roots east of Lamar Avenue, residents have pushed for more police patrols since early summer. The response has been limited. MPD can only put officers where it has officers.
South Memphis, the area stretching from the FedEx Forum south toward Shelby Drive, has seen clusters of shootings that often don’t make the news individually. They add up. One weekend in August produced seven shooting victims across the south side, three of them fatal. A typical weekend in 2018 might have produced one.
Rallings Under Pressure
Director Rallings has been the public face of Memphis policing since 2016. He’s navigated protests, budget fights, and a revolving door of city council criticism. This year feels different.
In July, Rallings stood at a podium and asked where the public outrage was. “We’ve had 120 adults and children gunned down this year,” he said. “Where’s the outcry?” The remark drew mixed reactions. Some residents felt he was deflecting blame from his own department. Others agreed that the silence around everyday violence in Memphis was deafening.
By September, the department was running a public information campaign asking citizens to help solve cases. The clearance rate for homicides has dropped, partly because witnesses are less willing to cooperate and partly because detectives are carrying heavier caseloads than they can manage. Rallings has pushed for more cooperation from the District Attorney’s office on prosecuting gun cases, saying the revolving door at 201 Poplar is feeding the cycle.
The city council has asked pointed questions about MPD’s strategy. Rallings has pointed to gang activity and easy access to firearms as primary drivers. He’s not wrong on either count. Memphis has seen a flood of handguns, including stolen weapons, circulating through its streets. Interstate shootings on I-240 and I-40 have spiked to 32 this year, up from 26 at the same point in 2019.
Still, strategy questions remain. The Blue CRUSH predictive policing program that Memphis pioneered a decade ago has been scaled back. Community policing initiatives have been disrupted by COVID. The department is roughly 300 officers short of its authorized strength, a gap that’s been growing for years and accelerated this year with retirements and resignations.
The Court System Bottleneck
One factor that gets less attention is the criminal court backlog. When COVID hit, Shelby County Criminal Court essentially shut down. Jury trials stopped. Grand juries stopped meeting regularly. The entire apparatus that processes people from arrest through sentencing slowed to a crawl.
The practical result: people arrested for violent crimes were getting out faster and staying out longer before trial. Bond amounts were reduced in some cases to limit jail overcrowding. Public defenders and prosecutors alike have described a system that lost months of capacity and hasn’t recovered.
Criminal Court Clerk Heidi Kuhn told the Commercial Appeal in August that the backlog could take a year or more to clear even after normal operations resume. For the neighborhoods where the same names keep cycling through the system, that delay has real consequences.
What This Means for Private Security
For Memphis businesses watching these numbers, the calculation is straightforward. Public safety resources are stretched thinner than they’ve been in years. MPD’s response times have lengthened. The neighborhoods where commercial properties, warehouses, and retail centers operate are the same neighborhoods seeing the worst of the violence.
Private security companies in the Memphis market have reported increased demand since June. Property managers who previously relied on one unarmed guard for overnight shifts are adding second guards or upgrading to armed coverage. Warehouse operations along Airways Boulevard and near the Memphis International Airport logistics corridor have been adding patrols.
The cost question is real. Hiring security isn’t cheap, and many Memphis businesses are already running on razor-thin margins because of COVID revenue losses. A single armed guard runs $25 to $35 an hour depending on the company and the licensing. A full 24-hour post can cost $15,000 or more per month.
Yet the cost of not having security is also going up. Commercial burglaries in Memphis have risen alongside the homicide numbers. Vehicle thefts from parking lots, break-ins at construction sites, copper theft from vacant buildings. Insurance companies have started asking pointed questions about security measures during renewal conversations.
The Math for the Rest of 2020
Memphis recorded 190 homicides in all of 2019. Through September 2020, the city has already passed 230. If the current pace holds, and there’s no reason to expect it won’t, Memphis could finish 2020 somewhere above 300. That would be roughly 50% higher than last year.
October, November, and December are historically not the quietest months for violent crime in Memphis. The holiday season brings its own stresses. COVID’s second wave is already showing up in rising case counts across Shelby County. Economic uncertainty is not going away.
The questions Rallings, the city council, and the Shelby County Commission will face in the final quarter of 2020 are not new. They’re the same questions Memphis has been asking for decades: how do you reduce violence in neighborhoods where poverty is concentrated, jobs are scarce, and the systems meant to help are overwhelmed?
Two hundred and thirty homicides, and the year isn’t over. For everyone watching those numbers from a desk in Germantown, a guard booth on Lamar, or a front porch in Frayser, the stakes are not abstract.
They’re counted in names.