On January 7, five Memphis police officers from the SCORPION unit pulled Tyre Nichols from his car near Raines Road and Ross Road. He died three days later. By the end of the month, the SCORPION unit was permanently disbanded, the officers were charged with murder, and Memphis was at the center of a national reckoning over police violence that hasn’t stopped reverberating.
I’ve covered the Memphis security industry for the better part of two decades, and I can tell you that no single event in that time has reshaped the operating environment as completely as the Nichols case. Everything that happened in 2023, every policy change, every hiring struggle, every technology investment, every contract negotiation, traces back in some way to those January nights.
This is the story of what happened to Memphis’s security industry in the year that followed.
January Through March: The Shockwave
The timeline moved fast. Nichols was beaten on January 7. He died January 10. On January 27, the city released the bodycam footage. Protests erupted across Memphis and nationwide. The next day, January 28, MPD Chief CJ Davis announced the permanent disbanding of the SCORPION unit.
For the private security industry, the immediate effect was a flood of phone calls. Property managers, retail chain operators, and business owners who had previously relied on MPD patrol presence as their de facto security strategy suddenly realized that the police department was going to be consumed by this crisis for months. Maybe longer.
They were right. By February, MPD was operating in damage-control mode. Internal investigations, policy reviews, officer reassignments. The department’s already strained staffing, roughly 1,950 sworn officers against an authorized strength closer to 2,500, got worse as morale cratered. Officers called in sick. Retirements accelerated. Recruiting, already difficult, became nearly impossible for a department making national news for all the wrong reasons.
Private security companies in Memphis saw demand spike almost overnight. One firm owner I spoke with in March described getting more inbound calls in six weeks than he’d gotten in the previous six months. The problem was supply. You can’t train and license armed security officers in a week. TDCI requires background checks, classroom training, and firearms qualification. The pipeline takes time, and every security company in town was trying to fill it simultaneously.
The Policing Vacuum and Who Filled It
By spring, a pattern had settled in. MPD was stretched thin, distracted by reform mandates, and losing officers faster than it could hire them. The Memphis City Council passed the Driving Equality Act and a series of police reform ordinances intended to prevent another Nichols-type incident. Those reforms were necessary. They also meant officers were operating under new rules with new restrictions while crime continued to climb.
This created what several security executives I’ve talked to this year call “the gap.” Not a policy gap or a funding gap, though those exist too. An operational gap. Fewer officers on patrol. Slower response times in certain precincts. Less proactive policing in neighborhoods that needed it most.
Private security companies stepped into that gap, whether they were ready for it or not.
Guard deployments at commercial properties in Frayser, Raleigh, Whitehaven, and along the Summer Avenue corridor jumped significantly through the spring and summer. Businesses that had never contracted security before were putting officers at their front doors. Apartment complexes that had relied on courtesy patrols started demanding armed, on-site presence.
The demand was real. The capacity to meet it was another story.
The Hiring Crisis Within a Crisis
Memphis’s private security industry entered 2023 already dealing with a tight labor market. Post-COVID wage inflation, competition from warehouse and logistics jobs (FedEx alone employs tens of thousands in Shelby County), and the general difficulty of recruiting people willing to work overnight shifts in high-crime areas had already made staffing the industry’s biggest headache.
The Nichols fallout made it worse. Some potential recruits who might have considered security work saw the footage and decided they wanted nothing to do with anything adjacent to law enforcement. Others who were already working as guards started asking for more money, correctly sensing that their employers needed them more than ever.
Wages moved. Billed rates for armed guards in Memphis crept from the low $20s per hour toward the mid-to-high $20s. Unarmed officer rates pushed above $18 in many cases. Companies that couldn’t or wouldn’t raise pay lost officers to companies that would.
TDCI added new training requirements in 2023 that, while reasonable from a public safety perspective, added time and cost to the hiring pipeline. Every new hour of mandatory training is an hour that a recruit isn’t generating revenue on a post. For smaller firms operating on thin margins, these requirements squeezed an already painful equation.
The result was a year where Memphis had more demand for private security than at any point in recent memory, and less ability to supply it. Companies turned away contracts. Response times at some firms deteriorated. Officer quality, always uneven in an industry with high turnover, became harder to maintain when the priority was just putting a body at every post.
Crime by the Numbers
The crime statistics tell the story plainly.
Memphis is on pace to close 2023 near 397 homicides. That’s staggering. Part 1 crimes, the FBI’s classification for serious offenses including murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft, remain elevated across nearly every category.
Vehicle thefts passed 10,000 incidents sometime in August, representing an increase of roughly 130 to 150 percent from pre-pandemic levels. Business burglaries tripled in some precincts. The Hickory Hill and Parkway Village areas, already dealing with chronic property crime, saw numbers that would have been front-page news in a year when the front page wasn’t dominated by police reform and federal investigations.
District Attorney Steve Mulroy announced a retail crime partnership with MPD in April, targeting organized theft rings hitting stores along the Poplar and Germantown Parkway corridors. The initiative was welcome, though its impact on the full-year numbers has been modest.
For the private security industry, these crime numbers are simultaneously a market driver and an operational burden. More crime means more demand for services. It also means more risk for officers, more incidents to document, more liability exposure, and more pressure to perform at a level that understaffed companies struggle to maintain.
The Federal Government Enters the Picture
On July 27, the Department of Justice announced a pattern-or-practice investigation of the Memphis Police Department. The investigation, triggered by the Nichols case, will examine MPD’s use of force, stops and searches, treatment of people with disabilities, and internal accountability systems.
Pattern-or-practice investigations typically last two to three years and often result in federal consent decrees that impose binding requirements on the department. For anyone watching the Memphis security market, this matters for a specific reason: consent decrees constrain police operations. They add reporting requirements, limit certain enforcement tactics, and generally slow the pace of policing while reforms are implemented.
If you’re a property manager reading this, the implication is straightforward. Whatever reliance you currently have on MPD for security at your properties is likely to decrease over the next several years, not increase. The department will be focused inward, on compliance, reform, and rebuilding public trust. That means the private security industry’s role in Memphis is going to keep expanding.
On November 2, Desmond Mills Jr., one of the five former SCORPION officers, pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges. The remaining cases are still pending as of this writing. Each court date brings Memphis back into the national spotlight and back into the difficult conversation about policing, force, and accountability.
Technology as the Answer (and the Question)
If 2023 had a bright spot for security in Memphis, it was technology. MPD’s Real Time Crime Center expanded significantly this year. The Connect 2 Memphis program, using Fusus (now Axon) technology, began integrating private business cameras into the RTCC’s surveillance network. AI-powered camera systems started showing up in local media coverage. License plate readers proliferated.
The private security industry is beginning to grapple with what this means. Companies that once competed on headcount, how many guards they could put on your property, are starting to compete on integration. Can you connect our cameras to the RTCC? Can you monitor our feeds remotely? Can you show us GPS data proving your officers actually patrol the routes we’re paying for?
This technology shift will separate the industry’s winners from its losers in 2024 and beyond. Firms that invest in systems, training, and integration capabilities will command premium contracts. Firms that are still running paper logs and relying on supervisor drive-bys will lose accounts to competitors who can show clients exactly what they’re getting.
What Changed in 2023
Step back far enough and the shape of the year comes into focus. Memphis’s private security industry entered 2023 as a supporting player in the city’s public safety structure. It’s ending the year as a primary one.
The Nichols case broke something in the relationship between Memphis and its police department. Trust, staffing, operational capacity, community goodwill. All of it took damage that won’t be repaired quickly. The DOJ investigation will add years to that timeline.
Into that space, private security has moved. Not always gracefully. Not always well. Companies scrambled to hire. Some cut corners. Quality varied. Pricing jumped. Clients who had never thought much about their security contracts started reading them carefully and asking hard questions.
That’s actually healthy. An industry growing under pressure is an industry being forced to professionalize. The companies that survive the next few years in Memphis will be better, more accountable, and more capable than the ones that entered 2023. The ones that don’t adapt will be replaced by firms that will.
Looking at 2024
I won’t pretend to know what next year holds. I will say that the factors driving change in Memphis’s security market, understaffed police, elevated crime, federal oversight, technology integration, and a workforce crisis, aren’t going away in January. If anything, they’ll intensify.
Property managers and business owners should be planning their 2024 security budgets with this reality in mind. The cost of competent private security in Memphis has gone up, and it’s not coming back down. The alternative, having no security or having poor security, has gotten more expensive too.
Memphis in 2023 asked its security industry a question it hadn’t faced before: can you fill the space that policing used to occupy? The answer was a qualified yes, strained and imperfect, delivered by an industry that was growing into a role it didn’t choose.
The question for 2024 is whether the industry can hold that space and do it well. The city, frankly, can’t afford the alternative.