The guard at a Germantown Parkway clothing store told me he’d been screamed at twice before lunch. Both times over masks. Both times by people who outweighed him by fifty pounds and had zero interest in hearing about store policy.
He’s 23. He makes $14 an hour. He signed up to watch for shoplifters.
This is what the delta variant is doing to security work in Memphis right now. Tennessee’s COVID numbers are climbing fast, hospitals in the Baptist Memorial and Methodist systems are filling beds again, and some businesses are quietly reinstating the screening protocols they dropped in the spring. The people tasked with enforcing those protocols, once again, are security guards who were never trained for public health work and whose contracts don’t mention it.
Delta Is Here and It’s Moving Fast
Shelby County reported 23 COVID deaths in a single week at the end of July. Case counts have tripled since June. The delta variant, which spreads roughly twice as easily as the original strain, is the dominant version circulating in Tennessee, and the state’s vaccination rate sits around 40 percent. In Shelby County it’s slightly higher, maybe 43 percent, which still leaves more than half the population unvaccinated.
The Shelby County Health Department has started holding joint task force meetings again. That alone tells you how much things have changed since May, when it felt like the pandemic was winding down. Memphis-area hospitals are reporting increased admissions. ICU capacity at Regional One and the Methodist network is tightening. Baptist Memorial’s DeSoto campus in Southaven has been diverting ambulances on high-volume days.
Tennessee doesn’t have a statewide mask mandate. Governor Lee has been clear about that. Individual businesses, though, can set their own rules. And more of them are doing exactly that.
The Awkward Middle
Retail chains along Germantown Parkway have started posting mask-required signs again. Several Downtown Memphis restaurants are back to checking temperatures at the door. A handful of office buildings in East Memphis are requiring visitors to fill out health questionnaires before they pass the lobby.
All of this work falls on security officers.
Think about what that means for a guard stationed at the entrance of a busy retail store. Yesterday’s job was checking bags and watching for theft. Today’s job includes asking every person who walks through the door whether they have a mask, offering one from a box on the counter, and dealing with the fallout when someone says no.
The confrontations are real and they’re getting worse. One security company owner who runs contracts at three Downtown locations described a Monday incident where a customer shoved a guard’s temperature scanner off the podium. “My guy kept his composure. Most people would’ve quit on the spot.” The guard filed an incident report. The customer left. Nobody was arrested.
These aren’t isolated events. Security officers across Memphis are reporting verbal abuse, threats, and occasional physical confrontations over mask and screening policies. The anger from last year’s mandate battles never fully cooled. It just went dormant for a few months while case counts were low. Now it’s back.
Training Gaps You Could Drive a Truck Through
Here’s the part that should worry every security company owner in Tennessee: most guard training curricula don’t include a single hour on health screening protocols, de-escalation around medical directives, or the legal boundaries of enforcing a business’s health policy versus a government mandate.
Tennessee requires 16 hours of training for unarmed security guards before they can work a post. The curriculum covers use of force, legal authority, report writing, and basic emergency response. COVID screening? Not in there. Temperature checks? No. How to handle a customer who refuses to wear a mask in a private business? Definitely not.
Companies that took this seriously last year developed their own supplemental training modules. A few of the larger national firms, Allied Universal and Securitas among them, rolled out pandemic-specific training in 2020 that covered PPE use, screening procedures, and de-escalation techniques for health-related confrontations. Some local Memphis companies did the same.
Many didn’t. And the guards who went through those 2020 training sessions may not have refreshed since. That was a year ago. Turnover in the security industry runs between 100 and 300 percent annually. A guard who learned screening protocols last July probably isn’t working for the same company today.
The result is a workforce being asked to do something they weren’t hired for, weren’t trained on, and don’t have contractual backing to perform.
The Contract Problem
Pull out a standard security services contract from most Memphis companies and look for language about health screening duties. In most cases, you won’t find any.
Contracts written before 2020 obviously don’t mention pandemic response. Even contracts drafted or renewed during 2020 and early 2021 often treat COVID duties as temporary add-ons, covered by verbal agreements or email amendments rather than formal scope changes. When businesses dropped their screening requirements in April and May of this year, everyone assumed the temporary measures were done.
Now they’re back, and the contractual gray area is creating real problems.
If a security guard conducting temperature checks misreads a thermometer and lets a symptomatic person into a nursing home, who’s liable? The guard? The security company? The business that asked for screening? If a guard physically prevents an unmasked customer from entering a store and the customer claims assault, does the security company’s insurance cover it?
These aren’t hypothetical questions. They’re the exact scenarios playing out in Memphis this week.
Security companies that want to protect themselves need to update their service agreements now. Not next month. This week. The amendments should spell out three things clearly.
First, what specific health screening tasks the guard will perform: temperature checks, mask distribution, verbal screening questions, or all three. Second, who provides the equipment (thermometers, masks, sanitizer, barriers) and who pays for it. Third, the liability allocation when a confrontation over health protocols turns physical.
Any contract that doesn’t address those three points is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
What the Shelby County Health Department Is Saying
The health department’s current guidance recommends that all individuals, vaccinated or not, wear masks in indoor public settings. It’s a recommendation, not a mandate, at least as of this writing. That distinction matters enormously for security officers.
A mandate carries legal weight. A guard enforcing a government mandate has clearer authority and stronger legal cover. A recommendation leaves the decision to individual businesses, which means the guard is enforcing a private company’s policy, not a public health order. The legal footing is different. The public’s reaction is different too. People who’d grudgingly comply with a government order are far more likely to argue with a store’s voluntary policy.
There’s been talk at the county level about reinstating an actual mandate if case numbers keep climbing. Some health officials have pushed for it publicly. Whether it happens depends on politics as much as epidemiology. For security companies, the smart move is to prepare contracts and training as if a mandate is coming, because if it does, you don’t want to be scrambling again.
Practical Steps for Security Companies Right Now
Stop treating this as a repeat of 2020. The dynamics are different. Public patience for screening protocols is thinner. The political environment around masks is more charged. Your guards are dealing with a population that’s been through 16 months of pandemic fatigue and isn’t interested in going backward.
Here’s what to do.
Update every active contract that includes a public-facing post. Add explicit health screening language, even if the client hasn’t asked for it yet. If the client reinstates screening next week, you want the framework in place.
Retrain your guards on de-escalation. Not the generic version from their initial 16-hour course. Specific scenarios: a customer refuses a mask and gets loud. A customer claims a medical exemption. A customer films the interaction and threatens to post it online. Walk through each one.
Issue clear written guidance on what your guards can and cannot do. They can offer a mask. They can inform someone of the store’s policy. They can call a manager. They cannot physically block someone. They cannot confiscate personal property. They cannot make medical determinations. Put it on paper. Make every guard sign it.
Check your insurance coverage. Call your carrier this week. Ask specifically whether your general liability policy covers claims arising from health screening activities performed by your officers. If the answer is unclear, get a rider.
And pay your guards more. That last point isn’t a contractual requirement. It’s a retention one. You’re asking people to do a harder, more confrontational job for the same money. The companies that recognize that will keep their staff. The ones that don’t will be posting help-wanted ads by September.
The delta variant didn’t ask permission to change the job description of every security officer in Memphis. It just did. The question is whether security companies will catch up before the next confrontation turns into a headline.