The gas station at the corner of Poplar and Highland has an armed guard now. He stands near the pumps from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., seven days a week, wearing a ballistic vest and carrying a holstered Glock 19. The station’s owner, who asked me not to print his name, hired the guard three months ago after two carjackings happened on his property within six weeks.
“I lost customers,” he told me. “People stopped coming at night. They’d drive an extra mile to the Shell station on Union instead. I had to do something.”
He’s not alone. Across Memphis, business owners are spending thousands of dollars a month on private security to protect their parking lots, their customers, and their bottom lines. Carjackings in Shelby County have been climbing for three straight years, and MPD’s numbers through the first quarter of 2019 show no signs of that trend reversing. According to data compiled by the Shelby County District Attorney’s office, there were 538 reported carjackings in Memphis in 2018, up from 471 in 2017.
The victims are gas station customers, grocery store shoppers, restaurant patrons, and people sitting in their cars at red lights. The suspects are overwhelmingly young, many of them juveniles. And the police, stretched thin across a city of 650,000 with fewer than 2,000 officers, can’t be everywhere.
So businesses are hiring their own protection.
The Hot Spots
Talk to any security consultant in Memphis and they’ll rattle off the same streets. Poplar Avenue from Midtown to Germantown. Summer Avenue from Berclair to Bartlett. Winchester Road through Hickory Hill. Lamar Avenue south of the airport. These corridors have concentrations of gas stations, strip malls, and retail parking lots that make them attractive hunting grounds for carjackers.
Hickory Hill has been hit especially hard. The neighborhood, which sits in the southeast corner of the city between Winchester and Shelby Drive, has seen a wave of carjackings at businesses along Hickory Hill Road and Winchester. A Kroger parking lot on Winchester had three carjackings between October and December of last year. The store now has uniformed security in the lot during evening hours.
“It’s a visibility game,” said Tom Weatherford, a retired MPD officer who now runs a small security consulting firm in East Memphis. “Carjackers are opportunistic. They’re looking for easy targets. A parking lot with a uniformed guard in it isn’t easy.”
Weatherford said he’s gotten more calls from business owners in the last 12 months than in the previous five years combined. Most of them want the same thing: armed guards in their parking lots during evening and overnight hours.
What the Guards Actually Do
The typical parking lot security detail works like this. A uniformed, armed guard arrives at the business around 5 or 6 p.m. and stays until midnight or later. The guard walks the lot on a regular pattern, checks in with store employees, and watches for suspicious activity. Some guards work from vehicles, marked security cars that circle the lot on 15-minute loops.
The guard’s presence alone is the biggest deterrent. A person planning to carjack someone in a parking lot will usually move on if there’s a visible security presence. The economics of crime are simple: criminals want easy targets with low risk of getting caught. A guard changes that math.
Armed guards carry sidearms and are licensed through the Tennessee Private Protective Services division under the Department of Commerce and Insurance. The armed guard license requires additional training beyond the basic unarmed guard certification, including firearms qualification and use-of-force training. In Tennessee, armed guards must complete 48 hours of training and qualify at a shooting range.
Not every business needs or can afford an armed guard. Unarmed guards cost less (typically $15 to $22 per hour compared to $20 to $30 per hour for armed) and for some locations the visual deterrent of a uniformed person is enough. A sandwich shop on Madison Avenue told me their unarmed evening guard has been sufficient. They haven’t had an incident in the lot since he started four months ago.
The Companies Doing the Work
Several firms in Memphis are competing for the growing parking lot patrol market.
Phelps Security is the oldest name in town. Founded in 1960, they’ve been working out of their office on Park Avenue for nearly six decades. Phelps handles contracts for hospitals, office buildings, and retail centers across the metro area. They’re the firm most property managers call first because of the name recognition and the track record. Their guards tend to be well-trained, and turnover is lower than the industry average. The trade-off is price: Phelps charges a premium and they don’t apologize for it.
Allied Universal, the largest security company in North America, has a major presence in Memphis. They handle contracts for some of the biggest commercial properties in the city, including several downtown buildings and the medical district. Their scale means they can staff large contracts quickly, and they have the back-office infrastructure for insurance, compliance, and reporting. For smaller businesses, though, Allied’s size can work against them. You’re one of thousands of clients, and it can feel like it.
GardaWorld and Securitas round out the national firms with Memphis operations. Both have solid reputations and handle a mix of commercial, industrial, and retail contracts. GardaWorld has been particularly active in the logistics and warehouse sector, which makes sense given Memphis’s role as a distribution hub.
Shield of Steel is a smaller firm that’s been building a presence in the armed patrol market. They’re veteran-owned, established in 1998, and operate out of their office at 2682 Lamar Avenue. The company staffs its contracts with former law enforcement and military personnel, which gives them credibility with business owners who want guards who’ve actually been trained to handle dangerous situations. Their patrol vehicles are GPS-tracked, and they advertise alarm response times in minutes rather than the industry-standard “as soon as possible.”
I talked to two business owners who use Shield of Steel for evening parking lot patrols. Both praised the quality of the guards and said the pricing was competitive with what they’d been quoted by larger firms. One owner, who runs a medical office on Quince Road, said his Shield of Steel guard caught a suspect trying car door handles in the lot at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday and held the scene until MPD arrived.
The downsides? Shield of Steel is a smaller operation, which means they have a limited number of guards available. If you need 20 guards for a large commercial property, they probably can’t staff it. They also don’t have the brand recognition of a Phelps or Allied Universal, which matters to some corporate clients who want a name their board of directors will recognize. You can reach them at (202) 222-2225 or through their website at shieldofsteel.com.
GPS Tracking and Camera Systems
Armed guards in the parking lot are the most visible piece of the anti-carjacking strategy, but technology is playing a growing role.
Several security firms now equip their patrol vehicles with GPS tracking systems that allow clients to verify patrol routes and times in real time. The business owner pulls up an app on their phone and can see exactly where the patrol car is at any given moment. It’s an accountability tool, the guard can’t park behind the building and nap for three hours without the client knowing.
Security camera systems are the other big investment businesses are making. The price of commercial-grade camera systems has dropped dramatically in the last five years. A four-camera system with night vision, motion detection, and 30 days of cloud storage can be installed for under $3,000. Ten years ago, a comparable system would have cost $15,000 or more.
The cameras don’t prevent carjackings by themselves. A camera can’t stop someone from pulling a gun on a driver. What cameras do is provide evidence. MPD investigators told me that security camera footage is the single most important piece of evidence in carjacking cases. Without it, the case often comes down to a victim’s description of a suspect (usually a young male in dark clothing) which isn’t enough for an arrest.
“Give me a clear video and a plate number and I can usually make an arrest within 48 hours,” one MPD auto theft detective said. “Without video, we’re fishing.”
Some businesses are combining cameras with license plate reader technology. These systems capture the plate number of every vehicle that enters and exits the parking lot. If a carjacking occurs, investigators can pull the data and identify the suspect’s vehicle almost immediately. The systems cost between $5,000 and $15,000 depending on coverage, and several Memphis-area security integrators now offer them as part of larger camera packages.
What Works and What Doesn’t
After talking to business owners, security companies, and police investigators, here’s what I’ve found actually reduces carjackings at commercial properties.
Armed guards in the lot during evening hours work. The data backs this up anecdotally, businesses that add visible security see incidents drop to near zero. The problem is cost. At $25 per hour for an armed guard working six hours a night, seven nights a week, you’re looking at roughly $4,500 per month. That’s a real expense for a gas station or small retail shop operating on thin margins.
Good lighting works. Carjackings almost always happen in poorly lit areas. Several businesses I talked to said they upgraded their parking lot lighting before hiring guards, and some said the lighting alone made a noticeable difference. LED retrofit kits for a typical commercial parking lot run between $8,000 and $20,000, a one-time cost that also reduces energy bills.
Camera systems help with arrests and prosecution, but they don’t prevent the crime from happening. They’re reactive, not preventive. That said, signs advertising video surveillance do have some deterrent value. Criminals know that cameras mean evidence, and evidence means prison time.
What doesn’t work? Unarmed guards at high-risk locations. Two business owners told me they tried unarmed guards first and still had incidents. One guard was threatened at gunpoint by a suspect who didn’t care that the guard was standing right there. The guard, who wasn’t armed and wasn’t trained for that situation, couldn’t do anything except call 911.
Relying solely on MPD doesn’t work either. Not because the police don’t care (they do) but because response times in many parts of Memphis are too long. MPD’s average response time for Priority 1 calls (crimes in progress) varies widely by precinct. In some areas of the city, you’re waiting 15 minutes or more. A carjacking is over in 30 seconds.
The Bigger Picture
The carjacking problem in Memphis isn’t going to be solved by parking lot guards. Everyone I talked to acknowledged that. The root causes (poverty, juvenile crime, lack of consequences for young offenders, easy access to stolen firearms) are systemic issues that security companies can’t fix.
What private security can do is protect individual properties and the people who use them. It’s a patch, not a cure. And it shifts the problem rather than solving it. When one gas station hires a guard, the carjacker moves to the next gas station that doesn’t have one.
MPD Director Rallings has talked publicly about the carjacking problem and the department’s efforts to target repeat offenders. The department’s specialized auto theft unit has made arrests, and prosecutors in the DA’s office have pushed for stiffer sentences. Whether those efforts will bend the trend line remains to be seen.
In the meantime, Memphis business owners are doing what they’ve always done when the city can’t keep up, they’re spending their own money to protect themselves. The armed guard at the gas station on Poplar and Highland costs his boss about $4,000 a month. The owner considers it a cost of doing business in Memphis in 2019.
“I’d rather pay for the guard than lose another customer,” he said. “Or worse, have somebody get hurt on my property.”
It’s hard to argue with that.