Six months into 2022, Memphis sits at a crossroads that the raw numbers can help us understand.
The headline figure most people track is homicides. Through mid-June, the city’s homicide count is running slightly below the pace that produced 346 killings in 2021. If the current trajectory holds through December, Memphis could finish the year somewhere around 300 homicides. That’s still a devastating number for a city of roughly 630,000 residents. It represents a rate of roughly 47 per 100,000 people, which places Memphis among the most violent cities in the country on a per-capita basis. There’s no way to frame that as anything other than a crisis.
The slight decline from 2021’s record deserves honest analysis. Is it meaningful? Is it sustainable? And does it tell the whole story of what’s happening across Shelby County? The short answers: possibly, unclear, and absolutely not.
Homicides: A Modest Decline in Context
Memphis recorded 346 homicides in 2021, an all-time record for the city. That number translated to a homicide rate of approximately 55 per 100,000 residents, placing Memphis alongside St. Louis and Baltimore in the small and grim club of American cities with the highest per-capita murder rates.
Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, who took over MPD in June 2021, inherited that trajectory and has made reducing violent crime her stated top priority. The SCORPION unit, launched in October 2021, was a centerpiece of that strategy. By January 2022, Mayor Jim Strickland reported the unit had made 566 arrests in its first three months, including 390 felony arrests and the seizure of more than 250 weapons and $103,000 in cash.
Through June 2022, the pace of killings suggests a year-end total in the range of 295 to 310. MPD will ultimately report 301 to 302 homicides for the full year, if late-year data follows the current trend. That would represent a roughly 13% decline from 2021.
A 13% drop sounds significant on paper. In practice, it means Memphis would still rank among the top five most dangerous large cities in the United States. For comparison, New York City’s homicide rate in 2021 was approximately 5.5 per 100,000. Chicago’s was about 18 per 100,000. Memphis, even with the improvement, would likely finish above 45 per 100,000.
Two factors could explain part of the decline. First, SCORPION’s focused enforcement in violent crime hot spots may be producing a deterrent effect. Second, the 2021 number was so extreme that some degree of statistical regression was probable regardless of intervention. It’s difficult to separate these effects with the data currently available.
Auto Theft: The Crisis That Keeps Accelerating
While homicides may be ticking downward, auto theft is moving in the opposite direction and doing so aggressively.
Memphis recorded over 9,000 motor vehicle thefts in 2021, a number that already ranked the city among the worst in the nation for this category. Through the first half of 2022, daily theft reports are running at approximately 27 to 30 vehicles per day, which projects to roughly 10,000 or more for the full year.
A few data points that frame the scale of this problem:
- The national motor vehicle theft rate in 2021 was approximately 282 per 100,000 population, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau.
- Memphis’s 2021 rate was approximately 1,430 per 100,000, more than five times the national average.
- Hyundais and Kias manufactured between 2011 and 2021 account for a disproportionate share of thefts nationwide due to a known vulnerability in their ignition systems. Memphis is no exception.
- Catalytic converter theft, while technically classified as larceny rather than auto theft, often accompanies or enables vehicle crime. National claims data from State Farm showed catalytic converter theft claims tripled from 2020 to 2021, reaching over 32,000 claims worth $73.7 million.
The geographic concentration of auto theft in Memphis follows predictable patterns. High-traffic commercial areas with large parking lots are prime targets. Apartment complexes with open lots and minimal security see frequent hits. The areas around Wolfchase Galleria, Hickory Hill, Whitehaven, and Raleigh report some of the highest volumes in the city.
For businesses, the auto theft epidemic creates several direct costs: higher insurance premiums for commercial fleet vehicles, liability exposure when employee or customer vehicles are stolen from company property, and the less quantifiable cost of lost confidence. A medical office on Quince Road told me last month that two patients had switched providers after their cars were broken into during appointments.
Carjacking: Memphis as a National Outlier
Carjacking deserves separate attention because Memphis has become a national outlier in this specific crime category.
Carjacking data is harder to track than standard auto theft because the FBI only recently began collecting it as a distinct category. The Council on Criminal Justice, which tracks crime trends across major cities, reported that Memphis had one of the highest carjacking rates in the country during the first half of 2022, with a reported rate of 32.4 per 100,000 residents.
That number demands context. Many mid-size American cities report carjacking rates in the single digits per 100,000. Memphis is running at roughly three to six times the rate of most peer cities.
Carjackings tend to concentrate in specific times and locations: gas stations after dark, drive-through lanes, residential driveways, and parking lots with poor lighting. The victims are often targeted for their vehicle type. Dodge Chargers, Dodge Challengers, and Nissan Altimas appear frequently in carjacking reports, likely because they’re popular with buyers and easy to sell for parts.
MPD has diverted resources toward carjacking specifically, including assigning detectives to a carjacking task force. Whether that effort is producing results isn’t yet visible in the mid-year numbers.
Property Crime: The Broadest Indicator
Looking at property crime as a whole gives perhaps the clearest picture of what daily life feels like for Memphis residents and business owners.
Memphis’s property crime rate for 2022 is tracking at approximately 1,421 per 100,000 residents. The national average sits around 1,958 per 100,000, which means Memphis actually falls below the national rate in this broader category. That might seem surprising given the auto theft numbers, and the explanation is statistical: property crime includes burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Memphis’s burglary rate has actually declined over the past several years as policing strategies and building security have improved. Larceny-theft is roughly in line with national figures.
Motor vehicle theft is the outlier pulling the overall numbers into crisis territory. Strip out auto theft, and Memphis’s property crime profile looks closer to an average large Southern city. Include it, and the picture changes dramatically.
This matters for businesses making security investment decisions. If you’re a retail operation worried about shoplifting, the Memphis data doesn’t suggest you face dramatically higher risk than retailers in Nashville or Atlanta. If you operate a property with a large parking footprint, your risk profile is among the worst in the country.
SCORPION’s Early Returns
Any honest mid-year assessment needs to address what MPD’s signature anti-crime initiative is producing.
SCORPION’s model involves deploying officers in unmarked cars to high-crime areas, conducting traffic stops, and executing warrants on known violent offenders. The arrest numbers from the first several months are substantial: hundreds of felony arrests, significant weapons seizures, and the recovery of stolen vehicles.
Whether those arrest numbers translate into sustained crime reduction is the question that won’t have a clear answer until year-end data arrives. Criminologists generally caution that aggressive enforcement strategies can produce short-term drops in specific crime categories without addressing root causes. They also note that such strategies carry risks — of over-policing, of community trust erosion, of civil rights concerns.
For now, the unit has political support from Mayor Strickland and operational backing from Chief Davis. The homicide numbers, if they hold, will provide ammunition for continuing the program. The property crime numbers, which show no comparable improvement, suggest that SCORPION’s focus on violent offenders hasn’t produced a spillover deterrent effect for lower-level crime.
National Context
Memphis doesn’t exist in isolation, and comparing its trends to national data helps separate local factors from national ones.
Nationally, violent crime in 2022 appears to be declining modestly from the pandemic-era peak. Major cities that saw sharp homicide increases in 2020 and 2021 are mostly trending downward in 2022. The Council on Criminal Justice’s mid-year report covering 23 large cities found that homicides dropped by approximately 2% in the first half of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021.
Memphis’s decline appears to be steeper than the national average, which could suggest that local interventions are producing above-average results, or it could reflect the statistical principle that extreme values tend to regress toward the mean. Likely it’s a combination.
Auto theft nationally rose about 7% from 2020 to 2021 and continued climbing into 2022. Memphis’s auto theft surge predates and exceeds the national trend, driven in part by the Hyundai/Kia vulnerability, in part by organized theft rings, and in part by the city’s geographic position along major interstate corridors that make it easy to move stolen vehicles out of state.
What Businesses Should Expect for the Rest of 2022
The data through June points to several practical conclusions for Memphis businesses and property owners.
Homicides will likely finish below 2021’s record. That’s positive, and it reduces the general sense of crisis that affects employee retention, commercial investment, and consumer behavior. A drop from 346 to roughly 300 killings won’t make national lists of safe cities, and it won’t. It could, at minimum, change the trajectory narrative from “getting worse” to “starting to stabilize.”
Auto theft will not improve this year. Nothing in the current data or enforcement strategy suggests a meaningful reduction in vehicle theft before December. Businesses should plan accordingly: improve parking lot security, communicate with employees about risk, review insurance coverage, and consider physical deterrents for fleet vehicles.
Carjacking will remain elevated. The factors driving carjacking in Memphis are structural, not cyclical. Until vehicle security technology improves, until stolen vehicle markets dry up, and until enforcement catches more offenders, this crime category will stay high. Businesses with drive-through operations, late-night hours, or gas station locations should assess their vulnerability.
Private security spending will keep rising. MPD’s staffing shortage isn’t improving quickly enough to restore pre-2020 service levels. Businesses that rely on police response for property crime protection will continue to supplement with private security. Budget for it.
Insurance costs will increase. Commercial property insurance in Memphis is already among the most expensive in Tennessee. Auto theft rates, combined with overall crime data, give insurers every reason to raise premiums. If your renewal is coming up, get quotes early and consider whether security improvements might qualify you for a discount.
None of this is good news. Some of it is less bad than last year, and that’s where Memphis finds itself in June 2022 — looking for incremental progress in a city still deep in crisis, counting small gains against a baseline that never should have gotten this high in the first place.
Sarah Chen covers crime data and security technology for Memphis Security Insider. She can be reached at sarah@memphissecurityinsider.com.