On a Wednesday afternoon last month, a property manager in Hickory Hill called 911 to report someone breaking into a vacant unit at her apartment complex. She waited forty-three minutes for a patrol car. By the time officers arrived, the intruder was long gone and had stripped the unit of its copper wiring.
That kind of response time would have been shocking five years ago. Today, it’s closer to the norm in parts of Memphis. The Memphis Police Department is running with fewer than 2,000 sworn officers on a force authorized for roughly 2,400, and the gap between what the city needs and what it can provide keeps getting wider. For property managers, retail store owners, and warehouse operators across Shelby County, the math has become simple: you can wait for a cruiser that may not come for half an hour, or you can pay someone to be there already.
The Numbers Behind the Shortage
MPD’s staffing problem didn’t appear overnight. The department has been losing officers faster than it can replace them for years now, and the pandemic made everything worse. Recruiting classes shrank in 2020 as the police academy dealt with COVID-19 restrictions on class sizes and physical training. Meanwhile, resignations and retirements kept their usual pace. Some months, more officers left than the academy graduated.
The department’s authorized strength sits around 2,400 sworn personnel. Current headcount hovers somewhere south of 2,000, though the exact number shifts week to week. That’s a deficit of more than 400 officers in a city that recorded 332 homicides last year.
Director Michael Rallings has acknowledged the staffing crunch repeatedly. His contract with the city expires in April 2021, and Mayor Jim Strickland’s administration is already searching for a replacement. Whether that search produces someone who can reverse the exodus is anyone’s guess. The union has pushed for better pay and benefits for years, arguing that Memphis officers earn less than their counterparts in surrounding municipalities.
That pay gap is a big part of the problem. Departments in Collierville, Germantown, and Bartlett offer higher starting salaries, lower crime exposure, and what many officers describe as a less hostile work environment. An MPD veteran with ten years on the job can move to Germantown PD and get a pay bump while working in a city where violent crime is a fraction of what it is inside the Memphis city limits.
“You can’t blame them,” one retired MPD lieutenant told me. “You’ve got guys working doubles in Frayser, dodging bullets, making less than a rookie in Collierville. At some point you’ve got to take care of your family.”
Response Times Tell the Story
The staffing shortage hits hardest in response times, the metric that matters most to the people calling 911. MPD doesn’t publish granular response time data for public review, which makes independent analysis difficult. What we hear from precinct commanders, patrol officers, and the business owners who rely on police response paints a bleak picture.
Priority calls (those involving imminent danger to life) still get fast responses most of the time. Officers will break from whatever they’re doing for an active shooter or a violent crime in progress. It’s the next tier down where things fall apart. Burglary alarms, trespassing calls, property crimes in progress, suspicious persons reports: these get stacked in a queue and dispatched as officers become available.
In some precincts, particularly the ones covering South Memphis, Whitehaven, and Raleigh, that queue can stretch for an hour or more during peak hours. An alarm activation at a commercial property on Elvis Presley Boulevard might sit in the system for forty-five minutes on a Friday night while every available unit handles violent calls.
For a business owner paying monthly monitoring fees to an alarm company, that response gap makes the alarm system feel almost decorative. The siren goes off, the monitoring center calls MPD, and then everyone waits.
Private Security Picks Up the Work
This is where private security enters the equation, and the shift has been building for months. Contract security companies across Memphis report a noticeable uptick in inquiries from property managers and business owners who either can’t get adequate police response or don’t want to depend on it.
Phelps Security, the family-owned firm on Park Avenue that’s been operating since 1960, told me their phone has been ringing more often with calls from commercial property owners asking about regular patrol services and standing guard posts. “We’ve always had steady business,” a Phelps representative said. “What’s different now is the urgency. People aren’t shopping around leisurely. They need someone on site.”
Imperial Security, headquartered on Poplar Avenue and one of the larger regional players, has seen similar growth in contract inquiries. Their strength in transportation and logistics security puts them in frequent contact with the warehouse operators along the I-240 corridor and out toward the airport. Several of those operators have added overnight guard posts in the past six months.
The national companies are seeing it too. Allied Universal and Securitas both maintain significant operations in Memphis, and the demand for warm bodies at commercial sites has pushed hiring into overdrive. Security guard positions are posted constantly on local job boards, often advertising signing bonuses and immediate start dates.
The Tension Nobody Wants to Talk About
There’s an uncomfortable dynamic at play when private security expands into the space that public policing once covered. Nobody wants to say it out loud, so I will: we’re watching the early stages of a two-tier safety system where protection quality tracks directly with ability to pay.
A large commercial property owner in East Memphis can hire round-the-clock armed security and install a camera system monitored by a private operations center. A small business owner on Lamar Avenue, operating on thin margins, gets the same strained MPD response as everyone else.
This isn’t unique to Memphis. Cities across the country are dealing with police staffing shortages, and private security has grown into a roughly $46 billion industry nationally. The difference here is scale. Memphis has one of the highest violent crime rates among major American cities. The gap between what’s needed and what MPD can deliver is wider here than in most places.
Some in law enforcement view the private security expansion with skepticism. Off-duty MPD officers have long worked security details at hospitals, nightclubs, and commercial sites, earning extra income while providing a uniformed police presence. As private security companies absorb more of that work, there’s friction over territory and standards.
“A private security guard isn’t a police officer,” one MPD supervisor reminded me. “They can observe and report, they can be a deterrent, and they can detain someone under certain circumstances. They can’t investigate crimes. They can’t make arrests in most situations. There’s a real difference.”
That distinction matters. A security officer posted at an apartment complex can call police if something happens, and their presence likely discourages opportunistic crime. They cannot, however, serve warrants, conduct traffic stops, or pursue a suspect who flees the property. Private security fills gaps in presence and deterrence. It doesn’t replace policing.
What Happens When Rallings Leaves?
Director Rallings’s departure from MPD (whenever it happens, whether in April or later) will mark a turning point for the department. The next director inherits a force that’s short-staffed, stretched thin, and competing with suburban departments and the private sector for every recruit.
The city council has discussed pay increases, hiring bonuses, and other incentives to attract and retain officers. Some of those proposals have moved forward; others have stalled in budget negotiations. Memphis operates under a tight municipal budget, and every dollar directed toward police salaries comes from somewhere else.
The next director will also inherit the political complexity of policing in Memphis in 2021. Public sentiment toward law enforcement shifted after the events of 2020, and recruiting young officers into a profession facing increased scrutiny is harder than it was five years ago. That’s true nationally, and it’s especially true in a city where the relationship between police and community has been complicated for decades.
Meanwhile, private security companies are hiring as fast as they can, running their own recruits through TDCI-required training programs and getting them posted on client sites within weeks. The pipeline is faster, the barriers to entry are lower (sixteen hours of training for an unarmed guard versus months at the police academy), and the demand is immediate.
Where This Goes
Memphis isn’t going to wake up tomorrow with 2,400 police officers on patrol. That deficit will take years to close, if it closes at all. In the meantime, the private security industry in Shelby County will keep growing because the market demands it.
For property managers and business owners, the calculus is straightforward. You can budget for private security and have a known, consistent presence at your site. Or you can rely exclusively on MPD and accept that response times may not meet your needs.
Most are choosing to do both: maintaining alarm systems and calling 911 when incidents occur, while also contracting with security firms for regular patrols and standing posts. It’s not cheap, and it’s not a perfect solution. It’s what’s available.
The real question isn’t whether private security will keep expanding in Memphis. It will. The question is whether the city can rebuild its police force fast enough to keep the gap from becoming permanent. Right now, nobody I’ve talked to is betting on it.