Tom Lee Park smells like hickory smoke again. After a full year of silence along Riverside Drive, the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest is back, and walking through the park this week feels like reuniting with an old friend who lost some weight and got a new haircut. The contest is here. The massive crowds and three-day Beale Street Music Festival are not.
Memphis in May 2021 is a scaled-down version of itself. The BBQ contest is running, yes, with teams firing up smokers and pulling pork along the bluff overlooking the Mississippi. The music festival, though, got cancelled for the second straight year. No stages on the north end of the park. No headliners drawing 100,000 people across a weekend. Just barbecue, a smaller footprint, and a whole lot of questions about how you run event security during a pandemic that isn’t quite over.
For the security teams working this year’s contest, the playbook has been rewritten from scratch.
The COVID Overlay on Everything
Let’s start with what’s different. Last year, there was nothing to secure. Memphis in May cancelled the entire festival in 2020 as COVID shut down large gatherings across the country. This year’s return is happening under conditions that didn’t exist the last time anyone worked security at Tom Lee Park.
Tennessee has no statewide mask mandate. Governor Lee lifted it months ago, and the state has largely moved toward a reopening posture. Shelby County has maintained some local health directives, though enforcement has been inconsistent at best. Vaccination rates across Memphis are climbing, with somewhere around 30% to 40% of adults having received at least one dose by early May, but that still leaves the majority of the city unvaccinated.
So what does that mean for the teams managing access points, walking the perimeter, and monitoring the vendor areas along the riverfront? It means ambiguity. There’s no clear statewide rule to enforce, local guidance keeps shifting, and individual comfort levels vary wildly from person to person.
One event security coordinator I spoke with put it this way: “Last time we did this, the biggest argument at the gate was about cooler sizes. Now we’re dealing with questions about masks, vaccination status, capacity limits. My guards aren’t public health officials. They’re trained to manage crowds and secure a perimeter. This is a different kind of job.”
What Event Security Actually Involves at Tom Lee Park
For anyone who hasn’t worked the BBQ contest before, here’s what the security operation looks like in a normal year. Tom Lee Park sits along Riverside Drive between the Hernando de Soto Bridge and the Memphis Cook Convention Center. It’s essentially a long, narrow strip of parkland between downtown and the river. The main entry points are along Riverside Drive, with the south end of the park near the bridge and the north end closer to Beale Street.
Security teams handle several distinct jobs during the contest. Perimeter control is the big one. The park has to be fenced or barricaded along its edges, with controlled access points where tickets are checked and bags are screened. Parking security covers the lots along Riverside and the overflow areas east of the park. Vendor area protection keeps an eye on the cooking teams’ equipment and supplies, which can represent thousands of dollars in smokers, grills, and meat. And general crowd management means keeping the flow of people moving, handling disputes, responding to medical situations, and coordinating with Memphis Police Department officers who also work the event.
In a normal year, the BBQ contest draws tens of thousands of visitors. This year, capacity is reduced. Organizers have implemented limits on daily attendance, though the exact numbers have been a moving target in the weeks leading up to the event. Fewer people means a smaller security footprint in some ways, but it adds a new job: monitoring and enforcing capacity limits. Someone has to count.
Building a Security Plan From Scratch
Most event security plans get updated year to year. You take last year’s plan, adjust for any changes in layout or attendance projections, and refine based on what went wrong. This year, there is no “last year.” The 2020 cancellation means security planners are essentially working from the 2019 template with a thick layer of COVID protocols added on top.
The key additions for 2021 include health screening protocols at entry points, though the specifics depend on what Shelby County’s health department is requiring at the time of the event. Some large outdoor events in other cities have implemented temperature checks or health questionnaires. Whether Memphis in May goes that route remains to be seen as of this writing, with last-minute adjustments still happening.
Spacing is another consideration. The cooking teams set up along the river in rows, with spectator areas in between. In past years, those walkways got packed shoulder-to-shoulder during peak hours, especially on Saturday afternoon when judging is underway. This year, wider lanes and potentially one-way foot traffic patterns could change the flow entirely. Security teams need to be positioned to manage that flow rather than just standing at fixed posts.
Communication protocols have also been updated. In a normal year, the radio chatter is focused on incidents: fights, medical calls, lost children, gate issues. This year, there’s an entire channel dedicated to COVID-related situations. What happens if someone at a gate refuses a health screening requirement? What if a cooking team member reports symptoms? These scenarios need to be scripted out in advance because guards need to know the answer before the question comes up.
Who’s Providing Security This Year
Memphis has a deep bench of event security providers, though the ongoing guard hiring shortage is thinning that bench considerably. Staffing an outdoor festival has always required a mix of full-time security professionals and temporary workers brought on specifically for the event. Finding those temporary workers is harder than it’s been in years, for reasons we’ve covered extensively in our reporting on the security guard hiring crisis.
Several Memphis-area security companies have experience working Memphis in May and similar large outdoor events. The contest organizers typically contract with one primary provider and supplement with additional firms as needed.
Among the local options, Shield of Steel is one company that offers event security services across the Memphis area and statewide. Veteran-owned and operating since 1998, the firm works out of 2682 Lamar Avenue in Memphis and can be reached at (202) 222-2225 or through shieldofsteel.com. Their experience with Memphis events and competitive pricing make them a solid option for mid-size event work, though their smaller team size means they may hit capacity limits on very large-scale events that require dozens of guards simultaneously.
Larger national firms with Memphis offices can bring more bodies to a major festival, and some of them have dedicated event security divisions with specialized training in crowd dynamics and emergency evacuation procedures. The tradeoff is usually cost: national firms charge premium rates and may not have the same familiarity with Tom Lee Park’s specific layout and quirks.
For an event like the scaled-down 2021 BBQ contest, the security staffing needs are more manageable than a full Memphis in May weekend. Still, the hiring crisis means that even a smaller event is competing with warehouses and distribution centers for the same available workers. Several providers I spoke with said they started recruiting for Memphis in May weeks earlier than usual this year, specifically because they knew staffing would be tight.
Lessons From Other Cities
Memphis isn’t the first city to bring back a major outdoor event in 2021. Events across the South and Southwest have been testing the waters since March, and their experiences offer some useful data points for security planners.
The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo ran a scaled-down event in March with capacity limits and health screenings. Their security team reported that the biggest operational challenge wasn’t the health protocols themselves. It was the inconsistency of enforcement. Some gates screened thoroughly; others barely checked. By the second day, word had spread among attendees about which entrances were easiest to get through. The lesson: whatever your protocol is, enforce it the same way at every access point, or don’t bother.
A country music festival in Florida in late April dealt with a different issue: maskless attendees in areas where masks were technically required. Security guards were told to “remind” people about the mask policy without confrontation. In practice, this meant almost no one wore masks by the afternoon. The takeaway for Memphis event planners is to decide upfront whether mask policies are advisory or enforced, and staff accordingly. Half-measures create friction with everyone and satisfy no one.
The View From Riverside Drive
Standing at the north end of Tom Lee Park this week, watching the cooking teams set up their rigs, it’s easy to feel like things are getting back to normal. The smoke is real. The competition is real. The river is still right there, same as always.
What’s different is everything around the edges. The empty space where music stages used to be. The wider gaps between vendor tents. The hand sanitizer stations bolted to posts along the walkways. The guards at the gate checking something they’ve never had to check before.
Memphis in May 2021 is a test run. Everyone involved knows it. If the BBQ contest goes smoothly, with no major COVID outbreaks traced back to the event and no security incidents that make the evening news, it builds the case for a full-scale return in 2022: music festival, BBQ contest, the whole thing.
The security teams working Tom Lee Park this week are part of that test, whether they think about it that way or not. Their job is the same as it’s always been: keep people safe. The definition of safe just got a lot more complicated.