Three months ago, Memphis went under curfew. From June 1 through June 8, the city shut down at 10 p.m. every night after protests over George Floyd’s killing spilled across downtown, down Beale Street, and into neighborhoods from Midtown to Whitehaven. Police Director Michael Rallings walked arm-in-arm with protesters on one of those early nights, a gesture that earned national coverage. The curfew ended. The marches tapered off. And then something quieter started happening.
Business owners started making phone calls. Not to City Hall. Not to the Memphis Police Department. To private security firms.
I’ve spent the past few weeks talking to security company operators, commercial property managers, and a few restaurant owners along the Poplar corridor and around the University of Memphis area. The pattern is the same almost everywhere. Companies that used to count on MPD patrol presence and fast response times are starting to budget for private guards, camera systems, and after-hours monitoring. The reason isn’t necessarily that they’ve lost faith in the police. It’s that the national conversation about police budgets has made them wonder what happens if funding actually gets cut.
What the city council is actually talking about
Let’s be clear about what’s happening at the municipal level, because the national “defund the police” phrase doesn’t translate directly to what Memphis City Council members are discussing.
The council held budget hearings in June and July. Memphis PD accounts for roughly a third of the city’s general fund. Nobody on the council has proposed eliminating police or slashing the department in half. The conversation centers on whether some of that money could go to community organizations, mental health response teams, and violence prevention programs. Council members Martavius Jones and JB Smiley have both spoken publicly about rebalancing, not about abolishing anything.
Director Rallings, who’s been leading MPD since 2016, has pushed back against cuts. He’s pointed out that the department is already understaffed relative to peer cities. Memphis has about 2,000 sworn officers for a city of 650,000. Compare that to Nashville, which has more officers per capita despite lower violent crime rates.
The Memphis Community Against Gangs and other neighborhood groups have a different perspective. They want more investment in job programs, youth outreach, and community mediation. Some of these organizations have been doing this work for years with almost no city funding. The argument is straightforward: a dollar spent on prevention is cheaper than a dollar spent on prosecution.
None of this is settled. The budget talks will continue into the fall. What matters for the private security industry is the uncertainty itself.
The business calculation
I talked to a property management company that runs about two dozen commercial sites across East Memphis and Germantown. The operations manager told me they added security guard contracts at six properties this summer. Before June, they had guards at two.
“We’re not making a political statement,” she said. “We just looked at what a break-in costs versus what a guard costs, and the math changed when we couldn’t be sure about response times.”
That’s the calculation a lot of business owners are running right now. It’s not ideological. It’s financial.
MPD response times have been a sore point in Memphis for years. The department’s own data shows average response times for Priority 1 calls (life-threatening emergencies) hovering around eight to nine minutes. For Priority 2 and 3 calls, which cover property crimes and disturbances, waits of 30 minutes to an hour aren’t unusual. Business owners at a Whitehaven commercial strip told me they’ve waited more than two hours for an officer to respond to a shoplifting call.
If the department loses officers to budget cuts or early retirements — and there are always rumors about both — those response times could stretch further. A private guard on-site eliminates the wait entirely for certain situations.
What the numbers look like statewide
Tennessee’s private security industry has been growing steadily for the past decade. The state Department of Commerce and Insurance licenses armed and unarmed security guards, and the numbers tell a story of steady expansion even before this summer.
Memphis is the epicenter of that growth. The city has more licensed security guards per capita than Nashville, Knoxville, or Chattanooga. That tracks with the crime data. Memphis consistently ranks among the top five most violent cities in the country by FBI statistics. Businesses here have always needed more security than the average American city.
What’s different now is the speed of new contracts. Several security firm owners I spoke with said their phones started ringing in early June and haven’t stopped. One company that operates mainly in the Raleigh and Frayser areas said they’ve added 15 new clients since Memorial Day. Another firm that covers the medical district around Methodist and Baptist hospitals told me corporate clients are extending guard hours from overnight-only to round-the-clock coverage.
The staffing problem
Here’s where the conversation gets complicated. Demand for security guards is spiking at the same time that hiring is genuinely difficult. The pandemic gutted the labor market in March and April. Enhanced unemployment benefits mean some potential workers can earn more by staying home. Security guard pay in Memphis typically ranges from $10 to $15 an hour for unarmed positions, which doesn’t compete well with the extra $600 per week in federal unemployment benefits that ran through late July.
Armed guards earn more, usually $15 to $22 an hour, depending on experience and certification. Getting armed certification in Tennessee requires additional training hours and a background check through the state. The pipeline for new armed guards takes weeks, sometimes months.
One security company owner in South Memphis put it bluntly: “Everyone wants guards right now. I don’t have enough people. I’m turning down contracts because I can’t staff them.”
That’s a strange position for an industry to be in during a recession. Demand is up. Supply is constrained. Prices are starting to climb.
What this means for Memphis from here
The police reform debate isn’t going away after the election. Whether the Memphis City Council shifts money away from MPD or keeps the budget roughly flat, the conversation itself has already changed how businesses think about security.
I’ve heard the word “layered” a lot this summer. Business owners talk about wanting layered security (their own cameras, their own guards, their own protocols) instead of relying on a single layer of police response. That mindset shift may be permanent even if police budgets don’t change at all.
The private security industry in Memphis was already substantial before George Floyd’s name became a rallying cry. What happened this summer accelerated a trend that was already underway. More businesses are treating security as an operating expense rather than an emergency expense. They’re writing it into lease agreements and annual budgets instead of scrambling after a break-in.
Whether that’s good or bad depends on your perspective. Critics of private security point out that guards are less accountable than police, less trained on average, and sometimes create their own problems. Supporters argue that a visible security presence deters crime without the baggage of a police encounter that could escalate.
Memphis will keep having this argument. The city has never had a simple relationship with its police department, and the events of this summer added new weight to an old debate. What I know for certain is that the phones at private security companies are still ringing. And the people calling aren’t asking about politics. They’re asking about availability and price.