Memphis recorded 298 homicides in 2023. Through the first six months of 2024, the city is tracking around 105, a pace that would land somewhere near 210 for the full year. That’s a 30% drop. And it’s not a blip.
Part 1 crimes across the board are trending downward in Shelby County. Aggravated assaults fell roughly 12% in the first quarter compared to the same period last year. Robberies are down by a similar margin. For a city that spent three years as a national talking point for violent crime, 2024 is delivering numbers that actually suggest real improvement.
So why are private security companies in Memphis reporting their best revenue quarters in years?
The Numbers Are Real
Let’s start with what’s actually happening in the data. Memphis Police Department’s CompStat reports through June 2024 show declines across most violent crime categories. Homicides are the headline number, and the trajectory is clear: after peaking near 346 in 2021 and staying above 280 through 2023, the 2024 pace represents a meaningful reversal.
The decline isn’t uniform across the city, though. Cordova and Germantown (technically its own municipality, but deeply tied to the Memphis metro economy) have seen relatively stable crime numbers because they were already low. Bartlett shows similar patterns. These suburban communities didn’t experience the same spike that hit Memphis proper between 2020 and 2023, so the “decline” for them is more like continued stability.
The real movement is in neighborhoods that bore the worst of the surge. Frayser, which led the city in per-capita violent crime for most of 2022 and 2023, has seen a noticeable drop in shootings through the first half of this year. Whitehaven, another historically high-crime area in south Memphis, reports fewer aggravated assaults. The Orange Mound and Parkway Village precincts show similar downward trends.
What’s driving it? A mix of factors that nobody wants to give a single explanation for. The Memphis Safe initiative, increased federal task force activity, attrition among violent offenders (incarceration and mortality), and possibly even demographic shifts in certain neighborhoods all play a role. The honest answer is that crime declined in most major American cities through 2024, and Memphis is following the national pattern with its own local variables layered on top.
Property Crime Tells a Different Story
Here’s where the optimism needs a reality check. While violent crime is falling, property crime in Memphis remains stubbornly elevated. Motor vehicle thefts, the category that exploded nationally thanks in part to the Kia/Hyundai vulnerability, are still running well above pre-2020 levels in Shelby County.
Through the first quarter of 2024, auto thefts in Memphis were down slightly from the 2023 peak, maybe 8 to 10 percent. That still puts the number far above where it was in 2019. And the geography of auto theft doesn’t respect the neat suburban-urban divide that violent crime follows. Cars get stolen from the Wolfchase Galleria parking lot in Cordova. They get stolen from apartment complexes along Germantown Parkway. They get stolen from driveways in Bartlett.
Burglaries are a mixed picture. Commercial break-ins dropped in some areas (the Poplar corridor, parts of East Memphis) while remaining steady in others (Raleigh, parts of Hickory Hill). Retail theft, which is harder to measure because reporting varies so much by store, appears elevated based on conversations with property managers and loss prevention teams across the metro.
For the security industry, property crime is the metric that drives purchasing decisions more directly than homicide counts. A business owner reads about a murder in Frayser and thinks “that’s terrible.” The same owner gets a window smashed at their Midtown storefront and calls a security company the next morning.
The Spending Paradox
This is where the data gets interesting for anyone tracking the private security market in Memphis.
Logic would suggest that falling crime leads to reduced security spending. If the city is getting safer, shouldn’t companies scale back their guard contracts? Shouldn’t apartment complexes drop their overnight patrol coverage? Shouldn’t retail centers let their security agreements lapse?
That’s not what’s happening. Not even close.
Security company owners I’ve spoken with over the past month describe a market where demand hasn’t softened despite six months of declining crime numbers. Several reported new contract signings in Q2 2024 that exceeded Q2 2023. One firm with heavy commercial coverage in the East Memphis and Poplar corridor told me their client retention rate was 97% heading into summer.
The explanation comes down to behavioral economics. Memphis businesses increased their security spending between 2020 and 2023 in response to a genuine crime surge. They added guard hours, installed cameras, upgraded access control systems, and signed longer contracts. Now that crime is declining, those businesses aren’t unwinding those investments. They’ve adjusted to the higher baseline.
“Nobody wants to be the one who cut security and then something happened,” a property manager who oversees retail centers in Cordova told me. “The board approved the budget increase two years ago. It’s just part of operating costs now.”
This stickiness in security spending is a well-documented pattern in the industry nationally. Once companies commit to a level of security coverage, they rarely reduce it voluntarily. The fear of being responsible for an incident after reducing protection is a stronger motivator than the cost savings from cutting back.
Suburban vs. Urban: Two Different Markets
The crime data reveals something that private security firms have known for years: suburban Shelby County and urban Memphis are functionally separate markets with different dynamics.
In Germantown and Collierville, private security has always been about maintaining property values and community expectations. Homeowner associations contract patrol services not because crime is rampant, but because visible security presence is part of what residents pay premium property taxes for. The crime decline in Memphis proper barely affects demand in these communities. They were already buying security for different reasons.
Bartlett occupies an interesting middle ground. Close enough to Memphis that crime trends do cross city lines, especially along the Stage Road and Summer Avenue corridors. Property managers in Bartlett pay attention to Memphis crime data in a way that Germantown managers don’t, because the spillover risk feels more tangible.
In Frayser and Whitehaven, the relationship between crime data and security spending is more direct, and more complicated. These areas have high crime rates and lower commercial property values, which means security budgets are tighter. A strip mall owner in Frayser can’t absorb a 40% increase in guard costs the way a Class A office building on Poplar can. When crime drops in these neighborhoods, some commercial tenants do push back on security costs. The savings pressure is real.
The result is a market that’s splitting in two. Suburban and premium urban clients maintain or increase spending regardless of crime trends. Lower-income commercial areas see modest pullback when numbers improve. Security companies that serve both segments have to manage this disparity in their pricing and staffing models.
What 210 Homicides Actually Means
Let’s put the projected 2024 number in context. If Memphis finishes the year around 210 homicides, that would be the lowest count since 2019, when the city recorded 198. It would represent a roughly 40% decline from the 2021 peak.
That’s significant. It also still means Memphis would have a homicide rate roughly four to five times the national average. For a city of about 630,000 people, 210 killings translates to approximately 33 per 100,000 residents. The national rate sits around 6 per 100,000.
So “crime is dropping” and “Memphis is still one of the most dangerous cities in America” are both true at the same time. The private security industry exists in the space between those two truths. The improving trajectory gives civic leaders something to point to. The absolute numbers give security companies something to sell against.
Property managers and business owners who follow the data closely tend to understand this distinction. The ones who read headlines often don’t. Security salespeople in Memphis have learned to lead with property crime data rather than homicide numbers, because property crime is both more personally relevant to a business owner and less likely to show dramatic improvement that undermines the sales pitch.
The Second Half Will Be Telling
Summer months typically produce the highest crime numbers of the year in Memphis. If the city maintains its current trajectory through August and September, the full-year decline will be real and substantial. A hot July, which Memphis is certainly experiencing right now, tests the durability of any downward trend.
The private security market in Memphis is healthy by almost any measure. Guard wages have increased modestly (up about $1.50 to $2.00 per hour on average since 2022), which helps with recruitment and retention. Client demand remains strong across commercial, residential, and event segments. The competitive environment is active, with national firms like Securitas and Allied Universal holding enterprise accounts while local and regional companies fight over the mid-market.
The question for the rest of 2024 isn’t whether crime will keep dropping. It probably will, barring an unforeseen spike. The question is when, or whether, that drop translates into reduced demand for private security services.
Based on what I’m seeing in the data and hearing from operators across the metro, the answer is: not anytime soon. Memphis businesses learned something between 2020 and 2023. They learned what it feels like to be underprotected during a crime surge. That memory has a long half-life. It’ll take more than one good year to convince them to spend less on security.
The budget line stays. Even when the numbers get better.