Twelve months ago, Memphis was a city bracing for another hard year. Homicide numbers in 2023 had reached 348. Motor vehicle theft was still rampant. Property crime, though starting to ease, remained stubbornly high across neighborhoods from Frayser to Whitehaven. The security industry was hiring as fast as it could, struggling with the same labor shortages that had plagued every service sector since the pandemic.
Now, at the close of 2024, the picture looks different. Total crime is down more than 13%. Homicides dropped roughly 30%, falling to around 250. Still a terrible number by any historical standard, but a meaningful decline from the peaks. Motor vehicle theft plummeted 39%. Major property crime fell nearly 20% compared to 2023. Memphis isn’t fixed. Nobody’s saying that. What the data does show is a city that bent the curve in the right direction for the first time in several years.
For the private security industry here, 2024 was a year of growth, adaptation, and some real growing pains.
Crime Trends: Progress With an Asterisk
The headline numbers are encouraging. Mayor Paul Young and Interim Police Chief cited the 13% overall decline at a press conference earlier this year. The Shelby County Crime Commission’s data backed it up. TBI’s figures, released separately, confirmed the direction if not every specific percentage.
A couple of details complicate the story. Violent crime, measured as a broad category, rose by a tiny fraction, about 0.058%. That near-flat number masks movement underneath. Murders dropped sharply. Aggravated assaults ticked up. Robberies fluctuated quarter to quarter without a clear trend.
Property crime told a cleaner story. Burglaries fell 5%. Thefts declined across most categories. The massive drop in motor vehicle theft (that 39% number) reflected both better policing and the natural tail-off of the Kia/Hyundai theft epidemic that had inflated car theft numbers in 2022 and 2023.
Worth noting: Memphis crime rates remain above pre-pandemic levels. The 2019 baseline is still lower than where 2024 landed. The progress is real, but it’s a recovery, not a return to normal.
The Private Security Market Kept Growing
Nationally, the private security services market is on a trajectory that shows no sign of slowing. Fortune Business Insights pegged the global market’s compound annual growth rate at 5.7% through 2032. Technavio projected the market would grow by $259 billion between 2024 and 2029. The U.S. held a dominant 75% share of the North American market in 2024, according to Grand View Research.
Tennessee sits squarely in this growth pattern. Memphis, as the state’s largest city and the one with the highest crime profile, drives a disproportionate share of the demand.
What does that look like on the ground? More guard companies filing for Tennessee Private Protective Services licenses. More requests for armed patrol services from commercial property managers. More retail chains hiring seasonal security earlier in the year. More residential neighborhoods pooling money for private patrol contracts.
The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance, which oversees guard licensing through the PPS Board, processed a steady stream of new applications throughout 2024. I don’t have final numbers yet. Those typically get published in Q1 of the following year. Conversations with several mid-size security firms confirmed that demand outpaced their ability to recruit and train guards for most of the year.
The Guard Shortage Didn’t Go Away
Every security company owner I talked to this year mentioned the same problem. They could sell more contracts than they could staff. Starting pay for unarmed security guards in Memphis sits between $14 and $18 per hour. Armed guards earn $18 to $25. Those wages compete directly with Amazon’s warehouse positions in Olive Branch, FedEx’s hub operations near the airport, and every fast-food chain paying $15 an hour with less physical risk.
A 22-year-old considering career options can drive for DoorDash, stock shelves at Costco, or stand outside a warehouse gate for eight hours in January. The security job requires training, a background check, and in some cases a firearms qualification. The others don’t.
Some companies responded by raising pay. Others added sign-on bonuses or flexible scheduling. A few tried recruiting military veterans separating from the Millington naval base north of the city. None of these approaches fully solved the problem.
The result: high turnover, increased overtime costs, and occasional gaps in coverage that frustrated clients. One property management company in East Memphis told me they’d cycled through three different guard services in 2024 because none could consistently fill their overnight shifts.
Technology Changed the Job
If 2023 was the year Memphis security companies started talking about AI-powered cameras, 2024 was the year they actually deployed them.
License plate recognition (LPR) cameras showed up at more apartment complexes, parking garages, and retail centers than in any previous year. Several Memphis security firms began offering LPR as an add-on service, mounting cameras on patrol vehicles that automatically scanned plates against stolen vehicle databases while guards drove their routes.
Video analytics moved from expensive enterprise territory into the mid-market. A camera that can distinguish between a person loitering near a loading dock and a shadow cast by a passing truck? That kind of software used to cost six figures. In 2024, several vendors brought the price down to a few hundred dollars per camera per year, making it accessible to smaller businesses and multi-family property owners.
Body cameras also became more common on private security guards. This was partly a liability play. Companies wanted their own footage in case a guard was accused of misconduct or excessive force. It was also a deterrent; people behave differently when they see a camera clipped to someone’s vest.
Remote monitoring centers, where operators watch camera feeds from dozens of sites simultaneously, grew their Memphis client rosters. The pitch is simple: instead of paying a guard $18 an hour to sit in a booth and watch a parking lot, pay $8 an hour for a remote operator to watch the same feed from a centralized facility and dispatch response only when something actually happens.
That model works for certain applications. It doesn’t replace a physical guard presence everywhere. The grocery store on Poplar that needs someone to deter shoplifting at 2 PM on a Tuesday can’t solve that with a remote camera. But the construction site that needs overnight surveillance? Remote monitoring is a better fit than a guard fighting sleep in a truck.
Retail Security Had Its Busiest Season
The annual cycle of retail security hits its peak between Black Friday and Christmas. This year, Memphis retailers started hiring seasonal security earlier than usual. By mid-October, several Wolfchase Galleria stores had added uniformed guards during operating hours. Carriage Crossing in Collierville did the same.
Organized retail crime (groups targeting stores for high-value merchandise) remained a concern. National retailers tightened their loss prevention programs, and some of that spending flowed to local security contractors who provided extra coverage during peak shopping hours.
The election season added another layer. In the weeks before and after November’s presidential election, some Memphis businesses boarded up windows or added temporary security out of caution. Downtown and Midtown locations were the most common targets for precautionary measures. The feared election-related unrest never materialized in Memphis, but the spending had already happened.
Regulatory Changes Worth Watching
Tennessee’s PPS Board made a few adjustments to its rules in 2024, with revised language around the Special Event Security Permit process. The changes clarified how temporary employees could be used for events and tightened documentation requirements.
The state also continued wrestling with questions around armed security and use-of-force standards. Tennessee’s permissive gun laws create an environment where the line between an armed citizen and an armed security professional can blur. The PPS Board’s position is clear: licensed guards must follow specific training and conduct standards. Enforcement remains patchy, especially with smaller companies operating in rural parts of the state.
At the federal level, the FTC’s continued scrutiny of non-compete agreements has implications for security companies that have historically used non-competes to prevent guards from jumping to competitors. If the FTC’s proposed rule survives legal challenges, Memphis security firms may need to rethink how they retain talent.
What Mattered Most in 2024
If I had to pick the three stories that defined the Memphis security industry this year, they’d be these:
The crime drop. It changes the conversation. When total crime declines 13% and homicides fall 30%, the public narrative shifts. Memphis is still a high-crime city by national standards. It’ll carry that reputation for years. But the trajectory matters to businesses making investment decisions, and it matters to security companies that pitch their services based on local conditions.
The staffing wall. Demand for guards exceeded supply all year. Companies that figured out recruiting and retention had a competitive advantage. Companies that didn’t lost contracts. This problem isn’t going away in 2025.
The AI camera rollout. Real deployments, not pilot programs. LPR on patrol cars, video analytics on commercial properties, remote monitoring as a serious alternative to static guard posts. The technology is here. The question now is how fast it scales.
Where 2025 Goes From Here
The security firms that thrived in 2024 were the ones that treated technology as a tool rather than a gimmick, invested in their guards’ pay and training, and stayed close to what their clients actually needed.
Memphis enters 2025 with momentum. Crime is dropping. The economy, while uneven, is generating commercial and residential development that creates new security demand. The private security market nationally is growing at nearly 6% annually, and Memphis should track at or above that rate given its concentration of logistics operations, healthcare facilities, and urban commercial properties.
The challenge is the same one that’s always defined this industry in Memphis: doing professional-grade work in a market that often tries to buy security on the cheap. Companies that compete on price alone will keep churning guards and frustrating clients. Companies that compete on quality (training, technology, reliability) will keep growing.
That’s been true for years. The difference now is that clients are starting to figure out which is which.