Memphis recorded 185 homicides in 2018. That’s down from 201 in 2017, which gives the city’s political leadership something to point to in press conferences. Sixteen fewer families burying someone. Sixteen fewer investigations for an already stretched homicide unit. The number is better. Whether it’s good is a different question.
For anyone working in the security industry in Shelby County, the homicide count is the headline, not the whole story. Property crime, aggravated assault, auto theft, carjackings, domestic violence: these categories drive security demand far more than murders do. A business owner on Summer Avenue doesn’t hire a guard service because of the homicide rate. She hires one because someone broke into her shop for the third time in six months.
The Homicide Picture
The 185 figure puts Memphis roughly where it was in 2016, when the city recorded 191 homicides. The spike to 201 in 2017 made national news and prompted Police Director Michael Rallings to restructure patrol deployments and push his hot-spot policing strategy harder. That strategy concentrates officers in the specific blocks and intersections where violence clusters, rather than spreading them evenly across precincts.
Did it work? The 16-death decline suggests something helped, though attributing it to any single policy is tricky. National crime trends also shifted slightly downward in 2018. Weather patterns, economic conditions, and demographic changes all play roles that are difficult to isolate.
The geographic distribution of homicides in Memphis follows patterns that haven’t changed much in a decade. Frayser, on the city’s north side, remains one of the most violent neighborhoods per capita. The area bounded by Range Line Road to the north, Thomas Street to the south, Watkins to the east, and the Wolf River to the west accounts for a concentration of homicides that far exceeds its share of the city’s population.
Orange Mound, one of Memphis’s oldest historically Black neighborhoods east of downtown, recorded double-digit homicides again in 2018. The neighborhood sits between Park Avenue and Lamar Avenue, centered around Carnes and Deadrick. Violence there is often interpersonal, rooted in disputes that escalate fatally because guns are everywhere. A retired MPD officer who worked the Orange Mound precinct for eight years told me that most of the homicides he investigated started as arguments. “It’s not organized crime. It’s two people who know each other, a disagreement, and a weapon within arm’s reach.”
Hickory Hill, in the southeast corner of the city along Winchester Road, has seen its crime profile worsen over the past several years. What was once a middle-class suburban neighborhood has experienced economic decline, rising vacancy rates, and increasing violent crime. The area around Hickory Hill Road and Knight Arnold Road is now one of the busier sectors for MPD patrol.
Property Crime: The Numbers That Hit Your Bottom Line
While homicides grab headlines, property crime is what keeps security company phones ringing in Memphis. The 2018 numbers weren’t good.
Auto theft remained one of the city’s most persistent problems. Memphis consistently ranks among the top cities nationally for vehicle theft per capita, and 2018 was no different. MPD recorded over 9,000 auto thefts during the year. That’s roughly 25 vehicles stolen per day across Shelby County. The Kia and Hyundai theft trend that would later explode nationally was already showing up in Memphis in 2018, with certain models being disproportionately targeted.
Burglary reports exceeded 8,000. Residential burglaries concentrated in neighborhoods with high vacancy rates, where empty houses provide cover for break-in crews to operate without witnesses. Commercial burglaries hit businesses along commercial corridors: Summer Avenue, Lamar Avenue, Elvis Presley Boulevard, and the Winchester Road stretch through Hickory Hill.
Larceny, the broadest property crime category, accounted for tens of thousands of reports. Retail theft drove much of this number, along with thefts from vehicles (a perennial Memphis problem that police have struggled to reduce despite repeated public awareness campaigns urging people to lock their cars and hide valuables).
For the security industry, property crime is the market driver. Every burglary that hits a business prompts a conversation about camera systems, alarm monitoring, or hiring a patrol service. Every auto theft from a commercial parking lot raises questions about whether the lot needs a security guard during business hours. The 2018 property crime numbers ensure that demand for private security in Memphis will remain strong through 2019 and beyond.
Aggravated Assault and the Violence Below the Headlines
Aggravated assaults in Memphis exceeded 7,500 in 2018. That number gets less media coverage than homicides, yet it reflects the much larger pool of violent encounters that define daily life in certain parts of the city.
Think of it this way. For every person killed in Memphis in 2018, roughly 40 people were victims of aggravated assault. Some of those assaults were attempted homicides where the victim survived, often because of medical intervention at the Regional Medical Center (The Med) on Union Avenue, whose trauma unit handles more gunshot wounds per year than almost any hospital in the country.
Domestic violence accounts for a significant share of aggravated assaults, and the 2018 numbers reflected a troubling pattern. The Memphis Family Safety Center, which opened in 2017 to centralize domestic violence services, served thousands of victims during its first full year of operation. The Shelby County District Attorney’s office prosecuted more domestic violence cases in 2018 than in any previous year.
This has a direct connection to the security industry. Apartment complexes, particularly those in South Memphis and along the Getwell Road corridor, increasingly hire security guards as a response to domestic violence incidents that spill into common areas, parking lots, and building hallways. A property manager at a complex near Lamar and Shelby Drive described the situation: “We can’t police what happens inside apartments. When it comes outside, when he’s banging on her door at 2 a.m. and the neighbors are calling me, that’s when I need a guard on site.”
Carjackings: The Rising Threat
Memphis saw carjackings climb in 2018, continuing a trend that started around 2015. MPD doesn’t always break out carjackings as a separate category in public statistics (they’re coded as aggravated robbery), which makes precise tracking difficult. Based on media reports and MPD press conferences, the number of carjacking incidents in 2018 likely exceeded 500.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who reads crime reports in Memphis. Parking lots at shopping centers along Poplar Avenue and in the Germantown Parkway area are targets. Gas stations on Winchester Road and Shelby Drive. Apartment complex parking lots in Hickory Hill and Raleigh. The victims are often women, targeted as they load groceries or sit in parked vehicles.
Carjackings are violent crimes that terrify communities out of proportion to their raw numbers. A neighborhood can absorb a certain number of car break-ins without changing daily behavior. A carjacking, where someone shoves a gun in your face and takes your vehicle at a Kroger parking lot on Poplar, changes how people move through the city. It changes where they shop, when they go out, and whether they feel safe in places they’ve gone for years.
For security companies, carjackings create demand for parking lot patrols at commercial properties. Retail centers, medical offices, and churches in areas with carjacking clusters have added guard presence during peak hours. It’s one of the clearest examples of violent crime directly generating private security revenue.
The Real Time Crime Center Effect
One of the most significant developments in Memphis law enforcement infrastructure over the past few years has been the Real Time Crime Center. The RTCC, housed at MPD headquarters on South Main Street, aggregates camera feeds from across the city into a centralized monitoring hub. Officers in the center can pull up live video from public cameras, private cameras that have been registered with the system, and traffic cameras managed by TDOT.
By the end of 2018, the RTCC had access to several thousand cameras. The network continues to expand. Businesses along major commercial corridors have been encouraged to register their security cameras with the system, giving police access to footage during investigations without having to physically visit each location and request recordings.
Director Rallings has talked repeatedly about the RTCC’s worth, calling it a force multiplier that lets MPD cover more ground with fewer officers. The center proved its worth during several high-profile incidents in 2018, including a chase that was tracked across multiple camera zones from Midtown to Whitehaven.
The RTCC also creates questions about surveillance, privacy, and the role of private camera systems in public safety. When a business registers its cameras with the RTCC, it’s giving police real-time access to video of its property and the surrounding public space. Most business owners see this as a fair trade. Some civil liberties advocates have raised concerns about the expansion of surveillance without adequate oversight. That debate will continue in 2019.
What This Means for the Security Industry
The 2018 crime data tells a familiar story with a few new chapters. Homicides dipped slightly. Property crime stayed high. Auto theft remained a national embarrassment. Carjackings kept climbing. Certain neighborhoods continued to absorb violence at rates that would be considered crisis-level anywhere else.
For the private security industry in Memphis, these numbers translate directly into demand. Property managers need guards. Retailers need loss prevention. Parking lot owners need visible deterrence. Apartment complexes need overnight patrols. Churches, which have dealt with their own security concerns nationally, are hiring guards for Sunday services in Memphis at rates that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.
The challenge for security companies is matching supply to demand. Tennessee requires private security guards to be registered through the TDCI under the Private Protective Services program. Armed guards need additional certification and training. Finding qualified people, running them through the licensing process, and retaining them in a competitive labor market is the operational bottleneck for most Memphis security firms.
The 2018 numbers won’t change that equation. If anything, they’ll intensify it. More crime means more demand for security. More demand means more pressure on firms that are already struggling to staff their existing contracts.
Director Rallings will hold more press conferences. The mayor will cite the homicide decline. Neighborhood associations in Frayser and Orange Mound will point out that a citywide average doesn’t mean much when your block had six shootings last year. And the security companies will keep hiring, keep bidding on contracts, and keep trying to find enough qualified guards to meet demand that shows no sign of slowing down.
Sixteen fewer homicides is progress. It’s not peace. The 2018 numbers make that distinction very clearly.