Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly said Memphis recorded 528 homicides in 2022. It also presented unsupported quarterly, neighborhood, staffing, insurance and seasonal claims, along with interviews we could not verify. This replacement removes those claims and uses official Memphis Police Department records. The original June 1, 2023 publication date is preserved; this corrected version was published October 15, 2026.
Memphis Security Insider is an independent publication. It is not affiliated with the Memphis Police Department, the City of Memphis or the U.S. Department of Justice.
The 2022 homicide number was wrong.
MPD’s official report does not show 528 homicides for that year. The department’s 2022 Annual Report says its Homicide Bureau investigated 399 cases, including 304 homicides, 250 criminal homicides and 33 justifiable homicides. Those labels appear together in the report and should remain attached to their numbers.
The false 528 figure drove other errors in the original article. It produced a made-up monthly average of 44 homicides and supplied the baseline for a summer forecast. Neither survives correction.
This matters beyond one bad number. Official MPD documents use several crime measures for different purposes. A homicide-bureau workload count is not necessarily identical to a Part 1 table, a murder count or a later state report. A responsible article names the agency, table, period and category before drawing a conclusion.
What MPD reported for 2022
MPD’s annual report contains two relevant sections.
The Homicide Bureau section gives the 304-homicide and 250-criminal-homicide figures. A separate Part One Crime table lists 280 homicides for 2022. The report does not reconcile those figures on the cited pages. We will not manufacture an explanation for the difference.
The same table says Memphis recorded 55,827 Part 1 crimes in 2022, up from 46,244 in 2021. It lists 11,159 motor-vehicle thefts in 2022, compared with 3,160 in 2021. MPD defines its Part One total on that page as homicide, burglary, robbery, vehicle theft, aggravated assault, rape and larceny.
Those figures show that MPD counted more Part 1 crime and motor-vehicle theft in 2022 than in 2021. They do not support the original statement that Memphis had 528 homicides or its claim that the city ranked at a particular national per-capita position. The original article cited no FBI table for that ranking.
The original Q1 claim cannot be rescued with later data
The article said first-quarter 2023 Part 1 crimes, homicides, burglaries, larcenies and aggravated assaults were all running above the same period in 2022. It attributed the claim generally to Crime Commission reporting without linking the report, defining the cutoff or showing the counts.
We did not locate a contemporaneous official MPD table in the article or its supporting material that verifies every part of that Q1 statement. The claim is removed.
Later official records show that MPD’s Part 1 total and several listed categories increased over a longer 2023 period. That is a different claim, and the dates must stay visible.
MPD’s third-quarter City Council presentation, refreshed October 20, 2023, compared January 1 through September 30 in 2022 and 2023. MPD reported:
| MPD category | Jan. 1-Sept. 30, 2022 | Jan. 1-Sept. 30, 2023 | Reported change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Part 1 total | 39,958 | 49,450 | +23.8% |
| Motor-vehicle theft | 6,963 | 12,230 | +75.6% |
| Homicide | 205 | 266 | +29.8% |
| Murder | 181 | 241 | +33.1% |
| Carjacking | 328 | 258 | -21.3% |
That table shows increases in reported Part 1 crime, motor-vehicle theft and the listed homicide measures through September. It also contradicts the original article’s broad statement that carjackings were climbing. In MPD’s year-to-date comparison, carjackings were lower.
The presentation was issued months after this article’s original publication. It can correct the historical record now. It cannot be cited as information the original writer had on June 1.
Auto theft rose; the May cutoff was unsupported
The original article said Memphis had passed 6,000 stolen vehicles by May and translated that into roughly 40 vehicles a day. It offered no MPD table, extraction date or definition for the cutoff.
We are removing both figures rather than working backward from later totals.
The later annual record provides full-year counts. MPD’s 2023 Annual Report lists 15,790 motor-vehicle thefts for 2023, compared with 11,159 in 2022, a 41.5% increase. The same report lists 64,577 total Part 1 crimes in 2023, up 15.7% from 55,827 in 2022.
Those annual counts do not verify the original May date. They also do not support its claim that Kias and Hyundais were the two most-targeted makes in Memphis, its one-in-45 vehicle calculation or its explanation that warm weather caused more theft opportunities. All three assertions lacked a local official source and are gone.
No official basis for the summer forecast
The original text predicted that violent crime could run 25% to 30% above spring levels from June through September. It called that range a decade-long Crime Commission historical average. No report, table or calculation was cited.
The forecast is removed.
Quarterly and annual totals cannot establish a seasonal average by themselves. Doing that work would require consistent monthly data, fixed offense definitions, a defined set of years and a disclosed calculation. It would also require care around reporting revisions and changes in how incidents are classified.
The original conclusion went further, predicting more deaths before October. That language offered certainty the evidence did not provide. It has no place in a corrected article.
What can be said about staffing and SCORPION
The old version tied crime changes to the disbanding of MPD’s SCORPION unit, officer shortages, longer shifts, slower response and crime moving between neighborhoods. It quoted unnamed precinct commanders and said other patrol divisions lacked the manpower to cover certain areas.
Some background facts are documented. The U.S. Justice Department’s later investigation report describes SCORPION as a now-disbanded specialized unit formed in November 2021 to address violent crime through street enforcement, including traffic stops. The report also describes MPD’s wider use of saturation enforcement.
That official description does not prove that ending SCORPION caused a specific 2023 crime increase, created a patrol gap or displaced crime from one Memphis neighborhood to another. The original article supplied no analysis that could establish those effects.
MPD’s 2023 annual report later listed its actual complement by rank. It marked recruits, dispatchers, police service technicians and civilians as non-commissioned, while listing reserve officers separately. The table does not establish the precise active sworn count on June 1. It also does not prove the article’s assertions about shift length, response time, patrol coverage, recruiting losses or commander views.
The unnamed interviews cannot be verified. They are removed.
Neighborhood, insurance and program claims are removed
The original article ranked Frayser first in violent incidents per capita, put Whitehaven close behind, referred to a string of shootings near Southland Mall and grouped Orange Mound and Hickory Hill as high-gunfire areas. No official table, boundary, period or offense definition accompanied those statements.
It also claimed national insurers raised some Shelby County rates by 15% to 20%, attributed renewal concerns to unnamed business owners, described armed neighborhood-watch patrols and church youth-program expansions, and outlined a “Safe Summer” enforcement plan without linking an official announcement.
We could not verify those claims from the cited record because there was no cited record. They are not being softened into vague language. They are deleted.
The corrected record
Official MPD reports support a narrow conclusion: Memphis recorded a large rise in Part 1 crime and motor-vehicle theft in 2023 compared with 2022. Through September, MPD also reported higher homicide and murder counts, while carjackings were lower under the categories in its presentation.
The records do not support the original 528-homicide figure, the Q1 category-by-category claim, the 25% to 30% summer forecast or the causal story built around staffing and SCORPION.
For property managers, the lesson is procedural. Record the source date. Preserve the offense label. Keep a citywide count separate from a site incident log. And when a public table does not answer the question, write “not established” instead of filling the space with a prediction.
That is the standard this corrected article now follows.