Ten months after the SCORPION unit’s disbandment, a property manager in Hickory Hill told me something that stuck. “I used to call MPD when we had problems in our parking lot,” she said. “Now I call my security company. They actually show up.”
That one sentence captures what’s happened to the security market in Memphis since January 28, when the Memphis Police Department dissolved its Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods unit following the killing of Tyre Nichols. The ripple effects have reshaped how businesses, apartment complexes, and commercial corridors handle safety. And the private security industry is scrambling to keep pace with demand it wasn’t built to absorb.
The Vacuum Nobody Planned For
SCORPION was aggressive street-level policing, concentrated in high-crime zones. Love it or hate it, the unit filled a role. Officers made traffic stops, served warrants, confiscated weapons, and maintained a visible armed presence in neighborhoods like Frayser, Whitehaven, and Orange Mound. When the unit went away, that visibility went with it.
MPD’s overall staffing tells the rest of the story. The department is authorized for roughly 2,500 officers. Current headcount hovers between 1,900 and 1,950, depending on who you ask and which week it is. Officers have been leaving for years, and the post-SCORPION environment accelerated departures. Some went to suburban departments in Collierville and Bartlett. Others left law enforcement entirely.
Proactive policing dropped. Traffic stops fell sharply since Nichols was killed during one. The officers who remained shifted toward reactive calls, responding after incidents rather than patrolling to prevent them.
For property managers, retail operators, and business owners across Shelby County, the math got simple: if you want someone standing in your parking lot at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, you’re going to have to pay for it yourself.
Private Security’s Gold Rush (and Its Limits)
The demand spike hit fast. Security companies that had been growing at five or ten percent a year suddenly fielded calls from property managers who’d never used private guards before. Strip malls along Summer Avenue. Apartment complexes in Parkway Village. Office parks near the Poplar corridor. Gas stations on Elvis Presley Boulevard.
I talked to a contract security company owner in East Memphis who said his phone “hasn’t stopped ringing since February.” He’s added 40 guards this year, bringing his total to around 160. His biggest challenge isn’t finding clients. It’s finding people.
And there’s the irony at the center of this story. The same labor market conditions squeezing MPD are squeezing private security firms too. Guard wages in Memphis have climbed from the $12-13 range to $15-17 for unarmed positions, with armed guards now commanding $18-22 depending on the post. Some overnight shifts in rough areas pay even more.
The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance processes about 4,200 security guard registrations each year statewide. That sounds like a reasonable pipeline until you realize how many don’t make it through. The $50 background check alone filters out roughly a third of applicants. Criminal history disqualifications are common in a market where the labor pool overlaps significantly with populations that have prior involvement in the justice system.
Armed guards face a steeper climb. Tennessee requires a 48-hour training course before someone can carry a firearm on a security post. That’s a full week of unpaid training for workers who often can’t afford to miss a week of income. The companies that cover training costs attract more applicants, but that investment only pays off if the guard sticks around, and turnover in this industry runs between 100 and 300 percent annually at many firms.
Where the Guards Are Going
The demand isn’t evenly distributed across Memphis. Certain sectors are absorbing private security at much higher rates than others.
Multifamily housing is the biggest growth area. Apartment complexes in Raleigh, Hickory Hill, and Whitehaven that previously relied on occasional MPD patrols are now contracting for nightly guard service. Some properties have gone from zero security spending to $8,000-12,000 a month. For a 200-unit complex collecting $800 in average rent, that’s a meaningful hit to operating margins, passed along through rent increases or absorbed by ownership groups betting that security spending reduces vacancy and property damage costs.
Retail corridors come in second. The stretch of Poplar Avenue from East Memphis to Germantown has always had a private security presence, but it’s thicker now. Same with the Wolfchase area, where retailers and restaurant operators have added guards for evening and weekend shifts that used to feel safe enough without them.
Construction sites and industrial properties round out the top three. Copper theft and equipment theft remain persistent problems. A generator stolen from a Frayser construction site can cost $15,000 to replace. A $200-a-night guard starts to look like a bargain.
The Quality Problem
More demand and a tight labor pool create a predictable result: quality suffers. I’ve heard from multiple property managers this fall about guards who sleep on duty, guards who don’t complete patrols, guards who can’t pass a drug screen after being hired.
The regulatory framework in Tennessee doesn’t catch everything. TDCI licenses contract security companies and registers individual guards. The background check screens for felonies and certain misdemeanors. What it doesn’t measure is whether someone will actually walk a property perimeter at 3 a.m. in November rain.
Some firms have responded by investing in GPS-tracked patrol verification, requiring guards to scan checkpoints throughout their shifts. Others use body cameras. These tools help, but they add cost, and cost-conscious property managers often push back on anything that raises the monthly invoice.
The companies winning right now are the ones that figured out retention before the boom hit. Firms paying above-market wages, offering health benefits, and promoting from within have lower turnover and more experienced guards. They can charge more because their service is genuinely better. Firms competing on price alone are cycling through warm bodies and generating complaints.
What MPD’s Staffing Means for Next Year
Here’s where I’ll take a position that won’t make everyone comfortable: MPD isn’t going to recover to full strength anytime soon. The department would need to hire roughly 550 officers to reach its authorized level, and the current recruiting environment makes that timeline measured in years, not months. The national law enforcement hiring crisis predates Memphis’s specific problems. Every mid-size city in the country is fighting over the same shrinking applicant pool.
That means private security isn’t filling a temporary gap. It’s becoming the permanent first line of property protection for a growing share of Memphis businesses and residential communities.
The implications are worth thinking through. Private security guards can observe and report. They can deter through presence. In Tennessee, armed guards can use force in limited defensive situations. What they can’t do is make arrests with the same authority as sworn officers, run license plates, or access law enforcement databases. The legal framework gives them less power and less protection than police officers.
When a property manager replaces MPD patrols with a contract guard, they’re getting a different product. It can be a good product. It can be exactly what they need. It is not the same thing.
The Numbers Nobody’s Tracking
Here’s something that bothers me. We track MPD staffing numbers obsessively. City Council discusses them. The media reports them. The mayor gets asked about them at press conferences.
Nobody is systematically tracking how many private security guards are now working posts in Memphis that used to fall under regular police patrol coverage. TDCI tracks registrations statewide, but there’s no Memphis-specific deployment data. No one at City Hall can tell you whether there are 3,000 or 5,000 or 8,000 private security guards working in Shelby County on any given night.
That’s a blind spot. If private security is genuinely becoming the primary visible safety presence for a significant portion of Memphis neighborhoods and commercial districts, then the quality, training, and accountability of those guards is a public safety question. It deserves the same attention we give MPD staffing.
What Comes Next
The private security hiring surge in Memphis isn’t slowing down. If anything, it’ll intensify through 2024 as more property owners budget for guard services they’ve never paid for before. The companies that invest in training, technology, and retention will grow. The ones running on thin margins and high turnover will burn through clients and contribute to the industry’s reputation problems.
For Karen reading this on her commute through Germantown, the takeaway is practical. If your security provider can’t tell you their guard retention rate, their average tenure, and how they verify patrol completion, those are questions worth asking at your next contract review.
The gap SCORPION left isn’t getting filled by one thing. It’s getting filled by a patchwork of private guards, surveillance cameras, community programs, and whatever MPD can still put on the street. Whether that patchwork holds together depends on whether anyone is paying attention to all the pieces at once.
Right now, nobody is.