Deputy Chief Samuel Hines didn’t sugarcoat it. Speaking to reporters this week, he laid out the numbers: Memphis has recorded 199 homicides through late August. The year isn’t two-thirds over. If the pace holds, the city will blow past 300 by December.
That number should alarm anyone paying attention. In 2019, Memphis finished the year with roughly 190 homicides total. The standing record is 228, set in 2016 during a particularly brutal stretch that saw clusters of shootings in Hickory Hill, Whitehaven, and North Memphis. We’re already closing in on that record with four full months still on the calendar.
Hines described the situation as a “perfect storm.” He’s not wrong about the metaphor, even if the causes behind it are more tangled than a weather pattern.
The first quarter was quiet
This is the part that makes the 2020 numbers so disorienting. January through March actually looked decent for Memphis. Homicide counts were running slightly below 2019 levels. Property crime was down. MPD leadership was cautiously optimistic during those early budget presentations. I remember sitting in a community safety meeting in February at the Whitehaven branch library where a precinct commander said the department was “trending in the right direction.”
Then COVID-19 arrived. Then George Floyd. Then summer.
The spike started in late April and has been relentless since May. Monthly totals that normally run between 12 and 18 homicides jumped to 25 or higher. June was particularly bad. July was worse. August isn’t finished yet and already looks like one of the deadliest months in recent Memphis history.
What’s driving the spike
Talk to criminologists at the University of Memphis and they’ll tell you there’s never one clean explanation for a sudden jump in homicides. Dr. Richard Janikowski, who spent decades studying crime patterns in Shelby County before his retirement, used to say that murder rates are “overdetermined,” meaning there are always more contributing factors than you need to explain the outcome.
That said, the contributing factors this year are unusually stacked.
Economic stress. Shelby County’s unemployment rate hit 15.7% in April. It’s come down since then, sitting around 11% in July, which still means roughly 50,000 people in the county are out of work. Economists at the University of Memphis have drawn direct connections between sustained joblessness and violent crime in previous downturns. When people lose income and stability, disputes that might have stayed verbal turn physical.
Social disruption. Schools closed in March. Community centers shut down. Churches went virtual. Summer youth programs either canceled or scaled back drastically. These institutions keep young people occupied and connected to adults who steer them away from trouble. Without them, the city lost thousands of hours of structured activity for teenagers and young adults, the demographic most likely to be involved in gun violence as both victims and perpetrators.
Strained police resources. MPD redeployed officers during the protests in late May and early June. Overtime budgets ballooned. Officers who normally work patrol shifts in places like Raleigh-Frayser and Orange Mound were pulled downtown for crowd control during the curfew period. Community policing initiatives and proactive patrols took a back seat to crisis management. Even after the protests subsided, the department has been playing catch-up on staffing rotations.
Summer heat. It sounds almost too simple, but the correlation between temperature and violent crime is one of the most consistent findings in criminology. Memphis summers are brutal. When the heat index pushes past 105, people are outside, tempers are short, and confrontations happen more often. July 2020 had multiple days above 100 degrees.
Guns. Tennessee’s gun laws are among the loosest in the country. There’s no permit required to purchase a firearm, no waiting period, and no universal background check requirement for private sales. MPD has been seizing weapons at a higher rate this year than last, which suggests more guns are circulating on the streets. Deputy Chief Hines noted that many of the 2020 homicides involve arguments that escalate because a firearm is within reach.
Where the violence is concentrated
The homicides aren’t spread evenly across the city. They never are. Pull up the data by zip code and the familiar pattern holds.
The 38109 zip code, covering Westwood and parts of southwest Memphis near the Mississippi state line, has been one of the hardest hit. So has 38127, which covers Frayser and parts of North Memphis. The Hickory Hill area around Winchester and Riverdale has seen a string of shootings at convenience stores and apartment complexes.
East Memphis and Germantown remain relatively quiet. Collierville, Bartlett, and Arlington in the outer suburbs report a fraction of the violence that the city’s core neighborhoods experience. This isn’t news to anyone who lives here, and it tracks with income levels, housing density, and access to services.
What’s changed this year is that some mid-range neighborhoods like Raleigh, Cordova, and the edges of Midtown are seeing more incidents than usual. A shooting at a house party near the Raleigh Springs area in July killed two people. A triple shooting at a Cordova gas station in June made the news for days. These areas aren’t accustomed to that kind of violence, and residents are unsettled.
The Shelby County picture
Memphis doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Shelby County’s overall crime data adds context that the city-only numbers miss.
The county sheriff’s office covers unincorporated areas and some of the smaller municipalities. Their homicide numbers are up too, though not as dramatically. The county jail population, which had been deliberately reduced in March and April to prevent COVID outbreaks, has been creeping back up as courts reopen and arrests resume.
District Attorney Amy Weirich’s office has been dealing with a massive case backlog caused by the pandemic shutdown of jury trials. Suspects charged with violent felonies are sitting in jail longer before trial or, in some cases, bonding out and returning to the streets. Defense attorneys have raised concerns about due process. Prosecutors say they’re doing their best with limited courtroom capacity.
The result is a justice system that’s processing cases slower than usual during a year when the caseload is surging. Nobody is happy with that arrangement.
The Chicago comparison
Hines made a striking comparison this week. He said if Memphis had Chicago’s population of 2.7 million but maintained its current per capita homicide rate, the city would be on pace for more than 1,000 killings by year’s end. Chicago, a city known for gun violence, was at roughly 500 homicides through late August.
The per capita framing matters because it strips away the misleading comfort of raw numbers. Memphis, with about 650,000 residents, is a mid-sized city. Its homicide rate per 100,000 people is consistently among the highest in the nation. If the city finishes 2020 above 300, that rate will be staggering.
For comparison, 2019’s roughly 190 homicides translated to about 29 per 100,000 residents. The national average that year was around 5 per 100,000. Memphis was already running at nearly six times the national rate. A year above 300 would push it past 46 per 100,000, territory normally associated with the most violent periods in American urban history.
What the number doesn’t tell you
Raw homicide counts flatten a lot of human reality. Each of those 199 deaths involves a family that got a phone call, a neighborhood that heard the sirens, a group of friends who lost someone. The people dying are disproportionately young Black men between 18 and 35. Many of the incidents stem from personal disputes, not stranger crime. Domestic violence accounts for a significant share.
The numbers also don’t capture the nonfatal shootings, which typically run three to four times higher than homicides. For every person killed in Memphis this year, three or four others have been shot and survived, many with life-altering injuries. Regional One Health Center’s trauma unit, located on Union Avenue, has been running at capacity for weeks.
What happens next
Four months remain in 2020. If the monthly pace stays at 25 or above, Memphis will shatter the 2016 record. And there’s no obvious reason the pace should slow down. The factors driving the spike haven’t changed. Unemployment is still high. Courts are still backlogged. Summer heat is giving way to fall, which typically brings a slight dip, so maybe October and November offer some relief.
MPD is talking about focused deterrence operations in the hardest-hit zip codes. Director Rallings has mentioned federal partnerships with the ATF and U.S. Marshals Service for gun recovery operations. These are familiar tools. They’ve worked in the past to produce short-term drops in specific neighborhoods.
Whether any of it is enough to change the trajectory of 2020 is an open question. The year started with promise. It turned ugly fast. The numbers don’t lie about that, even if they can’t tell the whole story.