Two hundred and ninety murders. Three hundred and thirty-two total homicides when you include justifiable killings and other classifications. In a city of roughly 650,000 people, that works out to a homicide rate north of 50 per 100,000 residents. Memphis didn’t just break its previous record in 2020. It demolished it.
This is our annual crime review, the one we publish every February to take stock of the year that just ended. Most years, we’re talking about incremental shifts: crime up three percent here, down five percent there, a neighborhood that improved or one that got worse. This year is different. The 2020 numbers represent a rupture, a year so far outside normal patterns that it demands more than a statistical summary. It demands an explanation.
The Memphis Shelby County Crime Commission tracks these numbers more carefully than anyone, and their data tells a story that lines up with what every patrol officer, property manager, and neighborhood resident already knows: 2020 broke something, and putting it back together is going to take years.
Homicides: The Headline Number
The 332 total homicides represent a roughly 70% increase over 2019, which recorded around 195 homicides. To put that in perspective, the previous record (set in the early 1990s during the crack epidemic) was around 228. Memphis blew past that mark by September.
The surge wasn’t evenly distributed across the calendar. Homicides spiked sharply in June and July, remained elevated through the summer, and never really came back down. The traditional summer crime increase, which happens in virtually every American city, hit Memphis harder than usual and then stayed.
Geographically, the violence concentrated in areas that have struggled for years: North Memphis, Frayser, Whitehaven, Orange Mound, and parts of South Memphis along the Third Street and Elvis Presley Boulevard corridors. These neighborhoods have high poverty rates, limited economic opportunity, and a long history of underinvestment. The pandemic made existing conditions worse in exactly the ways you’d predict.
That said, violence wasn’t limited to historically high-crime areas. Midtown saw a spike in armed robberies. East Memphis recorded more shootings than in any recent year. Even Germantown and Bartlett, the suburban enclaves that Memphis residents flee to for safety, reported increases in property crime.
Aggravated Assaults: The Number That Should Scare You More
Homicides get the headlines, and they should. Every one of those 332 deaths represents a person, a family destroyed, a community wounded. Yet the aggravated assault numbers may tell you more about the actual state of public safety in Memphis.
Aggravated assaults rose by roughly 18 to 20 percent in 2020, with thousands of reported incidents across Shelby County. An aggravated assault is an attempted homicide that failed, whether because the shooter missed, the victim survived, or the knife didn’t hit an artery. The difference between a murder statistic and an aggravated assault statistic is often nothing more than the distance to Regional One’s trauma center.
Memphis is lucky (if you can call it luck) to have one of the best trauma centers in the country. Regional One Health’s Elvis Presley Trauma Center handles gunshot wounds with a speed and expertise that saves lives other hospitals couldn’t. Some criminologists have estimated that improvements in trauma care over the past two decades have kept the national murder rate lower than it would otherwise be. Apply that logic to Memphis, and the actual level of violent intent in the city is even higher than the homicide numbers suggest.
Property Crime: A Split Decision
The property crime picture in 2020 is genuinely strange, and it reflects the bizarre conditions of a pandemic year.
Burglaries dropped. Residential burglary declined noticeably, and the reason is obvious: people were home. When tens of thousands of Memphis residents shifted to remote work or lost their jobs entirely and stayed in their houses all day, the traditional daytime burglary window disappeared. It’s hard to break into a house when someone’s sitting in the living room on a Zoom call.
Commercial burglary was more mixed. Some businesses closed permanently, leaving vacant storefronts that attracted break-ins. Others reduced hours, creating longer windows when buildings sat empty. The net effect on commercial burglary numbers was roughly flat, with decreases in some categories offsetting increases in others.
Auto theft exploded. Vehicle thefts in Memphis jumped dramatically in 2020, continuing a trend that had been building for several years. The numbers were bad enough that auto theft became a regular topic on local news and in neighborhood Facebook groups. Certain vehicle models, particularly older Hyundais and Kias without engine immobilizers, were targeted repeatedly. Some owners reported having the same car stolen twice in the same year.
The auto theft problem ties directly to the youth crime wave that Memphis has been grappling with. Many of the stolen vehicles were taken by juveniles, some as young as 12 or 13, who used them for joyriding or as transportation to commit other crimes. The juvenile justice system, already strained before COVID, essentially shut down during parts of 2020. Courts closed. Detention facilities reduced intake. Juveniles arrested for auto theft were often released within hours, sometimes to steal again the same week.
Carjackings became a crisis. This deserves its own line because of how dramatically the problem grew. Carjackings in Memphis went from a serious concern to an epidemic in 2020. Victims were pulled from their vehicles at gas stations, in parking lots, at intersections, and in their own driveways. The violence of these encounters escalated too: victims were beaten, pistol-whipped, and shot during carjackings that previous years might have been committed with threats alone.
The Kroger parking lot on Poplar and Highland. The Walgreens on Union. The Shell station on Winchester. The Target on Colonial. These are specific locations where carjackings occurred in 2020. Not dark alleys in neighborhoods most Memphians avoid, but the everyday places where middle-class families buy groceries and fill their gas tanks.
Why 2020 Happened: Three Overlapping Crises
There’s no single explanation for Memphis’s record-breaking crime year. Three major factors collided, and each one would have been bad enough on its own.
The pandemic. COVID-19 disrupted every system that keeps a city functional. Schools closed, leaving teenagers with no structure and no supervision for months. The job losses concentrated in lower-income communities that already had the highest crime rates. Drug treatment programs shut down or went virtual, which is functionally the same as shutting down for people without reliable internet. The stress of the pandemic, the financial pressure, the isolation, the grief from losing family members: all of it created conditions where interpersonal conflicts escalated faster and resolved more violently.
The courts shut down. This factor doesn’t get enough attention. Shelby County Criminal Court operated at severely reduced capacity for most of 2020. Jury trials were suspended for months. The backlog of pending cases grew enormous. People arrested for violent crimes sat in jail awaiting trial or, more often, were released on bond into the same communities where they’d committed the offense. The deterrent effect of swift prosecution evaporated. If you commit a crime in Memphis and know that the courts won’t get to your case for a year or two, the calculation changes.
Social unrest and police pullback. The killing of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked protests nationwide, including in Memphis. The city’s own history with police violence (the Tyre Nichols case was still years in the future, but Memphis has never lacked for tension between MPD and the community it polices) made the protests here particularly charged. In the weeks and months that followed, officers across the country reported a “pullback” effect: less proactive policing, fewer traffic stops, fewer pedestrian checks, less engagement with the community in ways that had previously disrupted criminal activity. Whether you call it the “Ferguson effect” or something else, the pattern in Memphis was consistent with what other cities experienced. Officers kept answering calls. They did less of the discretionary, proactive work that prevents crimes before they happen.
What the Numbers Mean for Security in 2021
Every crime statistic in this review translates directly into demand for private security services. Property managers reading this know exactly what I’m talking about.
When carjackings spike at retail locations, shopping center owners want visible security presence in their parking lots. When auto theft surges, warehouse operators and car dealerships want overnight patrols. When aggravated assaults climb in a neighborhood, the apartment complexes in that area start calling security companies.
The 2020 crime numbers will drive security hiring and contracting decisions throughout 2021. Companies that are already short-staffed will struggle to meet demand. TDCI-licensed armed guards, already scarce, will command higher hourly rates. The firms that can recruit, train, and deploy guards quickly will win the contracts.
Commercial insurance providers are watching these numbers too. Don’t be surprised if property insurance premiums in Shelby County rise in 2021, particularly for properties in high-crime zip codes. Insurers may start requiring security measures (cameras, patrols, alarm systems) as conditions of coverage, the same way they require fire suppression and sprinkler systems.
No Easy Fixes
The honest answer to “what do we do about this” is that nobody has a clean solution. Hiring more police officers takes years. Fixing the court backlog takes years. Addressing the root causes of violence in communities like Frayser and Orange Mound takes a generation.
In the short term, Memphis will rely on the same tools it has: an overstretched police department, a growing private security sector, a patchwork of community violence intervention programs, and the hope that the end of the pandemic will relieve some of the pressure.
The new MPD director, whoever that turns out to be, will inherit these numbers and the expectations that come with them. City council members facing reelection will point to any decline and claim credit, or point to any increase and blame their opponents. The Crime Commission will publish quarterly updates, and we’ll cover them here.
What won’t change quickly is the reality on the ground in the neighborhoods that bore the worst of 2020. The 332 people who died aren’t abstractions in a dataset. They were killed on specific streets, in specific circumstances, leaving specific families behind. Until the conditions that produce that violence change, the numbers will stay ugly. Memphis has been here before. Getting out takes more than a plan. It takes follow-through, year after year, in the places that need it most and get it least.