Through the first six months of 2022, Memphis recorded roughly 180 homicides. That’s a 15% jump over the same window last year, when the city was already on its way to 346 murders by December. The math isn’t complicated. If the second half tracks anything close to the first, Memphis will cross 350 and keep climbing.
I sat in on an MPD CompStat meeting last month where a precinct captain said something that stuck with me: “We’re staffing for the city we had in 2015, not the city we have now.” He’s right. MPD has about 1,967 sworn officers on the books, and the actual number available for patrol on any given shift is far lower than that. Retirements are outpacing recruitment by a margin nobody wants to talk about publicly.
Where the Numbers Hurt Most
The homicide count doesn’t spread evenly across Memphis. It never does.
Raleigh, which covers the area north of Stage Road and east of I-40, has been one of the deadliest precincts in 2022. Fourteen homicides in the first quarter alone. Drive through the commercial strip on Austin Peay Highway and you’ll see the signs of a neighborhood under stress: boarded storefronts next to open-late liquor stores, security cameras mounted on every building that can afford them.
Whitehaven, stretching from Shelby Drive south to the Mississippi state line, has recorded similar numbers. The area around Elvis Presley Boulevard between Brooks Road and Raines Road has been a persistent hot spot for three years running. Residents there told me in April that they hear gunshots so regularly they don’t bother calling 911 unless someone screams.
Hickory Hill may be the most troubled precinct in the city right now. The area bounded roughly by Getwell, Winchester, Hacks Cross, and Nonconnah Creek has seen a concentration of violent crime that’s disproportionate even by Memphis standards. Eleven homicides in the first five months. Three of them happened within a half-mile radius of the Hickory Ridge Mall site.
Cordova and Germantown remain comparatively safe, though both have seen upticks in property crime and carjackings. Bartlett reported two homicides through June, up from zero at the same point in 2021. Small numbers, yes. The direction matters.
The SCORPION Factor
MPD’s SCORPION unit, the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, has been one of Chief CJ Davis’s most visible crime-fighting tools. The unit runs aggressive patrols in high-crime zones, executing traffic stops, warrant service, and saturation operations in neighborhoods like Raleigh, Frayser, and Orange Mound.
The numbers on SCORPION look good on paper. Hundreds of gun seizures. Thousands of stops. Arrest numbers that fill up weekly press releases.
Still, the homicide rate keeps rising.
That disconnect raises a question that criminologists and community advocates have been asking since the unit launched: does aggressive, stop-heavy policing actually reduce murders, or does it just produce activity metrics? SCORPION officers are doing the work. Nobody questions their effort. The question is whether the strategy matches the problem.
A veteran MPD detective I spoke with in June, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, put it this way: “We’re pulling guns off the street every night. And every morning there are more guns. You can’t arrest your way out of a supply problem.”
He’s got a point. Tennessee has some of the loosest gun laws in the country. Permitless carry went into effect in July 2021. Getting a firearm in Memphis is about as difficult as getting a library card. The pipeline of weapons into the city doesn’t slow down because SCORPION seized 40 pistols in a week.
The Staffing Hole Nobody Can Fill
Chief Davis took over MPD in June 2021 with a department that was already short-staffed. A year into her tenure, the situation hasn’t improved. It’s gotten worse.
MPD’s authorized strength is somewhere north of 2,300 officers. The actual count sits around 1,967, and that number includes officers on desk duty, medical leave, and administrative assignments. The patrol division, the officers who actually respond to 911 calls and drive through neighborhoods, is stretched so thin that response times in some precincts have doubled since 2019.
Recruitment classes are smaller than they used to be. The last academy class graduated fewer than 40 officers. Retirements and resignations are running at roughly 15 per month. Do that math over a year and you’ll see why the union keeps making noise about a staffing crisis.
The pay doesn’t help. A starting MPD officer makes roughly $41,000, which isn’t competitive with suburban departments in Collierville, Germantown, or even the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. Officers who stick around long enough to get experience often leave for agencies that pay $10,000 more for the same work with a fraction of the danger.
This creates a brutal cycle. Fewer officers mean longer shifts and more mandatory overtime for those who remain. Burnout accelerates. More people quit. The department shrinks further.
What Summer Brings
Memphis has a grim seasonal pattern with homicides. The numbers climb when the temperature does. June, July, and August have been the deadliest months in Memphis for at least a decade. More people outside. More interactions. More arguments that escalate.
In 2021, June through August accounted for roughly 100 of the year’s 346 homicides, nearly a third of the total in just three months.
If 2022 follows the same curve, and there’s no reason to think it won’t, the city is looking at 90 to 110 homicides between now and Labor Day. That would push the full-year total somewhere between 340 and 380.
Some variables could change the trajectory. A large-scale federal intervention, which the city hasn’t requested and Washington hasn’t offered, could shift numbers. A significant SCORPION operation targeting specific drug networks rather than general patrols might produce different results. A sudden hiring surge at MPD could ease patrol coverage.
None of those things are happening right now.
The Precinct-Level View
Here’s what the first-half numbers look like across Memphis, based on MPD’s weekly reports and my own tracking:
Raleigh precinct: 28 homicides through June, up from 22 in the same period last year. The area around New Allen Road and Range Line Road has been especially bad, with six incidents within a two-mile stretch.
Whitehaven precinct: 24 homicides, roughly flat with 2021. The concentration along Elvis Presley Boulevard continues. Two triple-shootings in May alone.
Hickory Hill precinct: 22 homicides, up from 16 last year. The increase is driven partly by a spike in drug-related violence near the Knight Arnold and Mendenhall intersection.
Frayser precinct: 19 homicides, down slightly from 21. Frayser is one of the few areas showing any improvement, though the numbers are still appalling for a neighborhood of its size.
Orange Mound/Parkway Village area: 15 homicides combined. These neighborhoods have seen less media attention than Raleigh or Whitehaven this year, which doesn’t mean things are good. It means the violence is just below the threshold that gets television cameras rolling.
Downtown and Midtown: 8 homicides combined. Low numbers relative to the rest of the city. Property crime and aggravated assaults tell a different story, with Midtown in particular seeing a jump in armed robberies near Cooper-Young and along Madison Avenue.
What This Means for Private Security
Every homicide spike produces a downstream effect on the private security market. I’ve talked to four security company owners in the past month, and all four said the same thing: phones are ringing.
Property managers in Hickory Hill want armed guards. Apartment complexes in Whitehaven are adding overnight patrols. Retail chains in Raleigh are requesting uniformed officers at store entrances. Event venues downtown are doubling their security budgets for summer concerts and festivals.
The demand surge is real. The supply isn’t keeping up. Memphis security companies are fighting the same labor shortage every other employer in the city faces, except they need candidates who can pass background checks, complete 48 hours of state-mandated training, and show up reliably to posts that often involve standing in parking lots at 2 a.m.
That squeeze is creating opportunities for companies willing to pay more and train faster. It’s also creating risks. When demand outstrips supply, corners get cut. Undertrained guards end up on posts they aren’t ready for. Licensing paperwork falls behind. Incidents happen.
Looking at the Rest of 2022
Nobody at MPD headquarters is pretending the second half will be easy. The staffing numbers aren’t improving fast enough. The SCORPION unit is operating at full throttle and the city is still losing ground on homicides. The political pressure on Chief Davis and Mayor Jim Strickland is building.
Memphis has been here before. The city has hit homicide records and then retreated. It’s had bad summers followed by quieter falls. Predicting crime in a city this complex is a fool’s game.
What the first-half numbers tell us is simple: 2022 is on pace to be as deadly as 2021, and possibly worse. The interventions currently in place aren’t producing results fast enough to change that trajectory. And the people living in Raleigh, Whitehaven, and Hickory Hill already know what the rest of Memphis is just starting to see in the data.
The spreadsheets catch up eventually. The neighborhoods always know first.