A woman pulls into the Kroger parking lot on Winchester Road around 7:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. She’s grabbing milk and bread. Quick trip. She doesn’t see the two teenagers approaching from behind a parked SUV until one of them has a gun pressed against her window. They take her 2019 Hyundai Tucson. She’s left standing in the lot, shaking, calling 911.
This scene has played out across Memphis with alarming frequency in 2022. Through the first six months of the year, carjackings in the city are running roughly 40% above where they were at this point in 2021. Memphis Police Department data shows the trend accelerating, not slowing down.
And the auto theft numbers are even worse.
The Numbers Tell a Harsh Story
MPD recorded more than 4,200 auto thefts through the first half of 2022. That puts the city on pace to blow past 8,000 for the full year, which would shatter previous records. Some analysts inside the department think the final count could approach 9,500 if current trends hold through December.
Carjackings represent a smaller slice of that total, but they carry a psychological weight that straight auto theft doesn’t. When someone breaks into your car at 3 a.m. and hotwires it from your driveway, that’s violation enough. When someone puts a gun in your face at a gas station pump and takes your keys, that’s a different kind of crime entirely.
The distinction matters to victims. It matters to prosecutors. And it should matter to anyone trying to understand what’s happening on Memphis streets right now.
Where It’s Happening
Pull up a heat map of 2022 carjacking reports and a few ZIP codes light up like signal flares.
Hickory Hill leads the list. The area bounded roughly by Hickory Hill Road, Winchester, and Riverdale has seen carjacking reports nearly double compared to last year’s pace. The shopping centers along Winchester Road and the apartment complexes off Ridgeway are consistent hot spots. Victims report being targeted at gas stations, fast food drive-throughs, and grocery store parking lots.
Parkway Village runs a close second. The neighborhood straddling both sides of Park Avenue between Getwell and Mendenhall has dealt with a spike in armed vehicle thefts since spring. Several incidents have clustered around the strip malls near Park and Mendenhall, an area that sees heavy foot and vehicle traffic throughout the day.
Whitehaven continues to show elevated numbers, particularly along Elvis Presley Boulevard and near the Southland Mall area. Three separate carjackings occurred within a half-mile stretch of Elvis Presley Blvd. during a single week in June.
Raleigh, in the northern part of the city, rounds out the top trouble spots. The area around Austin Peay Highway and Stage Road has seen a steady increase in both carjackings and conventional auto thefts throughout 2022.
Downtown Memphis and Midtown have not been immune, either. Several high-profile incidents near Beale Street and along the Poplar Avenue corridor have rattled residents who assumed these areas carried less risk.
What’s Driving the Surge
Three factors are converging to push these numbers upward.
Young offenders. MPD officers and Shelby County prosecutors say the average age of carjacking suspects has dropped over the past two years. Teenagers — some as young as 14 and 15 — are showing up in arrest reports with increasing regularity. Juvenile court referrals for auto theft and carjacking are straining a system that was already stretched thin before the pandemic.
The Kia and Hyundai problem. If you own a Kia or Hyundai manufactured between 2015 and 2021, your vehicle has become a target nationwide. A viral TikTok trend, driven by a Milwaukee group calling themselves the “Kia Boys,” demonstrated how to steal these vehicles using nothing more than a USB cable and a screwdriver. The exploit works because many Kia and Hyundai models from those years lack electronic immobilizers that other manufacturers include as standard equipment.
Memphis has not been spared. MPD reports indicate that Kia and Hyundai models account for a disproportionate share of 2022 auto thefts. Some of those thefts start as carjackings when thieves want a specific vehicle quickly rather than spending time breaking in.
Organized rings. Not every carjacking is a random crime of opportunity. Federal prosecutors in the Western District of Tennessee have been building cases against organized crews responsible for multi-vehicle theft sprees across the city. Three Memphis men were charged earlier this year in connection with a spring 2022 carjacking spree that spanned multiple neighborhoods. The cases suggest a level of coordination that goes beyond teenagers joyriding.
The Task Force Response
MPD formed a dedicated carjacking task force earlier this year, pulling detectives from several precincts to focus exclusively on the problem. The unit works alongside the department’s existing auto theft squad and coordinates with the Shelby County District Attorney’s office on prosecution strategy.
Chief CJ Davis has pointed to the task force as evidence that the department takes the surge seriously. Results, so far, have been mixed. Arrests are happening. Convictions take longer.
The task force’s approach leans heavily on surveillance footage. Memphis has one of the densest networks of public and private security cameras in the Southeast, and investigators have used that footage to identify suspects, track stolen vehicles, and connect separate incidents to the same crews. The city’s Real Time Crime Center, which monitors live camera feeds across Memphis, plays a role in coordinating the response.
Still, catching carjackers after the fact doesn’t prevent the crime from happening in the first place. And that’s the frustration you hear from residents in the hardest-hit neighborhoods.
What Residents Are Doing
Talk to people in Hickory Hill and you hear the same things over and over. They’re avoiding certain gas stations after dark. They’re parking under lights. They’re keeping their heads on a swivel at the ATM. Some have started carrying firearms in their vehicles, a decision that carries its own risks.
Gloria Tate, who has lived near the intersection of Hickory Hill Road and Knight Arnold for 22 years, told me she won’t stop at the Shell station on the corner after 6 p.m. anymore. “I drive all the way up to Germantown to get gas some nights,” she said. “It’s ridiculous that I have to do that. I shouldn’t have to leave my own neighborhood to feel safe pumping gas.”
She’s not alone. Multiple Hickory Hill residents described similar changes to their daily routines — shopping earlier in the day, avoiding certain parking lots, keeping car doors locked the moment they sit down.
In Parkway Village, a neighborhood watch group has started sharing carjacking alerts through a private Facebook group with more than 2,000 members. Admins post descriptions of suspects, stolen vehicles, and incident locations within hours of crimes being reported. The group has helped MPD identify at least two suspects this year, according to a member who asked not to be named.
A Question of Resources
Memphis police are working with fewer officers than at any point in recent memory. The department’s authorized strength sits around 2,300, but actual staffing has hovered closer to 1,900 for most of 2022. Recruitment struggles that started during the pandemic haven’t reversed. Attrition continues to outpace hiring.
That staffing shortage ripples through every crime category, carjackings included. Fewer patrol officers means slower response times. Slower response times mean fewer on-scene arrests. And when suspects know the odds of getting caught in the act are low, the calculus shifts in their favor.
The city’s SCORPION unit, a specialized crime suppression team that launched last year, has made some carjacking arrests during its saturation patrols in high-crime areas. Those operations have produced results, though civil liberties advocates have raised questions about the unit’s aggressive tactics.
What Comes Next
Auto theft in Memphis isn’t a problem that materialized overnight, and it won’t disappear quickly. The Kia/Hyundai vulnerability will persist until those vehicles are either recalled, retrofitted, or aged out of the fleet. Young offenders will keep finding that the rewards of carjacking outweigh the consequences they actually face. And organized theft operations will continue as long as stolen vehicles retain resale value in chop shops and across state lines.
For residents, the calculus is simple and exhausting: stay aware, stay cautious, and hope the task force keeps producing arrests.
The numbers through July suggest that hope alone isn’t enough.
David Williams covers crime and public safety for Memphis Security Insider. Reach him at [email protected].