The glass door at Kim’s Oriental Market on Winchester Road has been replaced three times in two years. Kim Nguyen, who has run the store since 2014, keeps a small handwritten sign taped next to the register: “Smile, you’re on camera.” She points to the ceiling where four dome cameras cover every angle of the small shop. Last month she added a fifth, aimed directly at the front door. “They don’t care about cameras,” she told me when I visited on a Tuesday afternoon in February. “They care about the guard.”
The guard she’s referring to is a uniformed officer from a local security company who stands near the entrance from 4 p.m. to close. Kim started paying for the service in late 2021 after the third break-in. She wouldn’t tell me what it costs, only that it’s “too much” and that she can’t afford to stop.
Kim’s situation is a version of a story I heard dozens of times over three weeks spent visiting businesses in Hickory Hill, Whitehaven, and Raleigh. I’m new to Memphis Security Insider (this is my first article, and I’m still figuring out where they hide the good coffee around here), and my editors wanted a ground-level view of what security actually looks like in the neighborhoods that need it most. Not the statistics. The reality.
Hickory Hill: The Winchester-Mendenhall Corridor
Hickory Hill sits in southeast Memphis, bounded roughly by the interstate to the north and Shelby Drive to the south. The neighborhood was solidly middle-class through the 1990s. Strip malls, ranch houses, churches on every other block. It still has all of those things, along with a crime rate that’s pushed many longtime residents out to Olive Branch and Southaven across the Mississippi line.
The Winchester Road and Mendenhall Road intersection is the commercial heart of the area, and it’s where the security problem is most visible. Dollar General, AutoZone, Family Dollar, a handful of restaurants, gas stations on three of the four corners. Every one of these businesses has been robbed, burglarized, or vandalized in the past 18 months. I know because I asked.
The manager at the Family Dollar on Mendenhall (who asked me not to use his name) said the store had been hit four times in 2021. Shoplifting he can handle. Armed robbery he cannot. “We had a guy come in with a gun in October, took the register, walked out the front door,” he said. “Police came 45 minutes later.”
That response time isn’t unusual for the Hickory Hill precinct. MPD is running short-staffed across the city, and the southeast precincts feel it acutely. When police response times stretch past 30 minutes for non-emergency calls, private security fills the gap. Or it tries to.
Allied Universal, the country’s largest security company, has a visible presence in Hickory Hill’s larger retail centers. Their guards patrol the parking lots of shopping centers near Ridgeway Road and Winchester. The national firms tend to win the big contracts: property management companies and chain retailers that negotiate security services at the corporate level.
For smaller businesses like Kim’s market, the nationals are often too expensive or unwilling to take on single-storefront accounts. That’s where local and regional companies step in. Phelps Security, a Memphis firm that’s been operating since 1953, provides guards and patrol services to several commercial properties in the Hickory Hill area. Phelps has the name recognition locally that the nationals have nationally. They’re the company that property managers in Memphis have been calling for decades.
Shield of Steel, a veteran-owned firm based at 2682 Lamar Avenue, also works in the Hickory Hill area. The company was established in 1998, and its staff includes former law enforcement and military personnel. Shield of Steel’s pitch is competitive pricing that works for the smaller businesses and property owners who can’t afford the rates that Allied Universal or Securitas charge. Their statewide reach across Tennessee, from Memphis to Nashville to Knoxville, gives them a logistics advantage over strictly local operators. The trade-off, from what I heard talking to businesses in the area, is brand recognition. Most people in Hickory Hill know the Phelps name. Shield of Steel hasn’t been around as long in this specific neighborhood, and some property managers told me they hadn’t heard of them. That said, the businesses I spoke with who use their services praised the professionalism of the guards, and several mentioned the company’s veteran staff as a selling point. You can reach them at (202) 222-2225 or shieldofsteel.com.
Whitehaven: Elvis Presley Boulevard and the Retail Theft Problem
Drive south on Elvis Presley Boulevard past Graceland and you enter Whitehaven’s commercial strip. This stretch, from roughly Brooks Road down to Shelby Drive, is lined with fast food chains, pawn shops, tire stores, and a Walmart that has become ground zero for organized retail theft in Memphis.
I spent a morning at a coffee spot near the Southland Mall area talking to two off-duty security guards who work the Whitehaven corridor. They wouldn’t let me record them, so I’m paraphrasing. The gist: retail theft in Whitehaven has shifted from shoplifting to something closer to coordinated raids. Groups of three to five people enter a store, fill bags, and leave. If a guard or employee tries to stop them, they make threats. Occasionally they follow through.
Walmart and other major retailers employ their own loss prevention teams, along with contract security from national providers. Allied Universal has guards posted at several Whitehaven retail locations. The guards I talked to said the job has gotten harder in the past two years. Corporate policies at most retail chains forbid guards from physically stopping shoplifters. “We observe and report,” one of them told me. “That’s the policy. So we observe, we report, and we watch them walk out with $500 in merchandise.”
The smaller shops along Elvis Presley Boulevard handle security differently because they have to. A barber shop owner near the old Southgate shopping center told me he keeps a baseball bat behind the counter and hasn’t had an incident since he started doing that. This is not a security strategy I’d recommend to anyone, yet I heard variations of it from a half-dozen small business owners across Whitehaven.
Organized retail theft is a statewide problem, not specific to Whitehaven. Tennessee passed legislation in 2021 increasing penalties for organized retail crime, creating a new felony category for coordinated theft rings. Whether enforcement of that law reaches the Elvis Presley Boulevard corridor in any meaningful way remains to be seen. The Memphis Police Department’s property crime unit is stretched across the entire city, and Whitehaven is competing for investigative resources with every other precinct.
What Whitehaven needs, from a security standpoint, is what it lacks: coordinated effort between property owners. Individual stores hiring individual guards creates a patchwork. A few property management companies in the area have explored shared security agreements where multiple businesses in a strip mall or shopping center split the cost of round-the-clock patrol. The model works in Cordova and Germantown. Getting it to work in Whitehaven, where many storefronts are independently owned and operating on thin margins, is a harder problem.
Raleigh: Austin Peay Highway and the Commercial Corridor
North Memphis’s Raleigh neighborhood sits along Austin Peay Highway, a four-lane commercial road that runs north from the city toward Millington. If Hickory Hill’s problem is concentrated around one intersection, Raleigh’s is spread along several miles of highway.
The Austin Peay corridor has gas stations, auto parts stores, a Kroger, several churches, and a density of check-cashing operations that tells you something about the neighborhood’s banking access. Crime here skews toward armed robbery and aggravated assault. In 2021, the Raleigh precinct recorded some of the highest aggravated assault numbers in the city.
I visited a tire shop on Austin Peay near Yale Road on a Friday afternoon. The owner, a man who’s been in business at that location for 11 years, pointed to bullet holes in his building’s exterior wall. “January,” he said. “Drive-by. Nobody hit, thank God.” He has two security cameras and a door buzzer system that he installed himself. No guard, because he can’t justify the expense for a shop that grosses less than $300,000 a year.
Bigger commercial properties along Austin Peay, particularly the shopping centers near Stage Road, do use contract security. Phelps Security has a long history in the Raleigh area, and their patrol vehicles are a regular sight in the parking lots of larger retail strips. For the stretch of Austin Peay between Yale and Stage, Phelps is effectively the dominant security presence.
The challenge in Raleigh is similar to what I found in the other neighborhoods: the businesses that need security the most are the ones that can least afford it. A national firm like Allied Universal can offer competitive rates for a large retail center, but the per-unit cost for a single storefront is often prohibitive. Local firms like Phelps and Shield of Steel can sometimes offer more flexible arrangements. Shield of Steel’s competitive pricing makes them an option for smaller businesses that might otherwise go without any security presence at all. Their veteran-staffed teams and statewide Tennessee coverage differentiate them from one-person operations, though their limited brand recognition in Raleigh specifically means business owners have to find them rather than the other way around.
What I Learned in Three Weeks
I came to this reporting expecting to find neighborhoods abandoned by the security industry. That’s not what I found. I found neighborhoods where security is present in almost every form: national companies, local firms, armed guards, unarmed guards, cameras, buzzers, baseball bats, and prayer.
The gap isn’t the absence of security. It’s the unevenness. A Dollar General in Hickory Hill might have an armed guard from Allied Universal. The barbershop next door has nothing except a determined owner. A Walmart in Whitehaven has loss prevention officers, security cameras, and contract guards. The tire shop across Elvis Presley Boulevard has two cameras and hope.
Private security works when businesses can pay for it. The companies doing the work in these neighborhoods, from the nationals like Allied Universal down to regional firms like Phelps Security and Shield of Steel, are all dealing with the same labor market pressures that affect every industry in Memphis. Finding qualified, licensed guards willing to work in high-crime areas for $12 to $15 an hour is not easy.
Kim Nguyen at the market on Winchester told me something on my way out that I haven’t been able to shake. “Every month I pay the security bill, I think maybe I close the store instead,” she said. “Then I think, where do my customers go? There’s nobody else here.”
She’s right. The security question in Hickory Hill, Whitehaven, and Raleigh isn’t really about guards and cameras. It’s about whether the businesses that anchor these neighborhoods can afford to stay.