Three hundred and ninety-eight. That’s the number that will define Memphis in 2023. It’s the number of people killed in our city last year, a record that surpassed 2022’s total of 288 by 38 percent. It translates to a homicide rate of roughly 63.9 per 100,000 residents, the highest in the city’s history and one of the highest rates of any American city in the modern era.
Every February, this publication puts out our annual crime review. I’ve written this piece four years running, and each time I sit down to do it, I think maybe the numbers will have leveled off. This year, I didn’t have that thought.
Let me walk through what the data actually shows, where the worst damage was concentrated, and why the story is more complicated than a single headline number.
The Headline Numbers
Memphis Police Department reported approximately 398 criminal homicides for calendar year 2023. To put that in context: the city recorded 288 homicides in 2022, 346 in 2021, and 332 in 2020. The 2023 total is a 38 percent jump from the prior year and shatters the previous record.
Part 1 crimes, the FBI’s classification for the most serious offenses (homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft), all came in at or near record levels. Aggravated assaults remained stubbornly high throughout the year. Robbery numbers ticked up. Burglaries held roughly steady compared to 2022, which was itself an elevated year.
Vehicle theft deserves its own paragraph. Memphis has been one of the worst cities in the country for car theft since 2021, driven partly by the Kia and Hyundai vulnerability that went viral on social media. The good news, if you can call it that: vehicle thefts showed a declining trend in the final three to four months of 2023. October, November, and December numbers came down compared to the summer peak. Whether that holds into 2024 is an open question.
Larceny, which includes shoplifting and other property theft, remained the single highest-volume Part 1 crime category, as it is in virtually every major American city. Memphis retailers reported significant losses, and organized retail theft rings continued to be a problem across Shelby County.
A City Shaped by January 7
You can’t write about 2023 crime in Memphis without starting on January 7. That’s the night Tyre Nichols was beaten by five officers from MPD’s SCORPION unit during a traffic stop. Nichols died in the hospital three days later. Video of the beating was released on January 27, and the national and international reaction was immediate.
The consequences reshaped Memphis policing for the entire year.
SCORPION was disbanded within days of the video release. The unit had been MPD’s most aggressive proactive crime suppression tool, responsible for thousands of stops, searches, and arrests in high-crime areas. Its dissolution left a visible gap in enforcement. Officers across the department, watching five colleagues face murder charges, became more cautious. Traffic stops dropped. Proactive patrols slowed. The term “de-policing” showed up in conversations at every precinct.
By July 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a formal investigation into MPD’s practices. The DOJ probe is examining patterns of excessive force, discriminatory policing, and stops without reasonable suspicion. That investigation is ongoing as of this writing. Its outcome could restructure how MPD operates for the next decade.
The relationship between SCORPION’s disbanding and the 2023 homicide spike is something every criminologist, police official, and activist in Memphis has an opinion about. The data is suggestive: homicides accelerated sharply in the months following the unit’s dissolution. Correlation and causation are different things, and the debate around that distinction has become one of the most politically charged conversations in the city. What’s not debatable is the timeline. SCORPION was shut down in late January. By mid-year, Memphis was on pace to shatter its homicide record.
Where the Violence Hit Hardest
Crime in Memphis has never been evenly distributed, and 2023 was no exception. The Shelby County Crime Commission’s data, which maps incidents by precinct and neighborhood, shows clear concentrations.
Frayser, in the city’s north end, remained one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Memphis. Frayser has struggled with violent crime for years, driven by high poverty rates, limited economic activity, and a housing stock that has deteriorated significantly since the 2008 financial crisis. The area around North Watkins and Rangeline Road saw repeated incidents throughout 2023.
Whitehaven, south of the city center, experienced both property and violent crime increases. The commercial strips along Elvis Presley Boulevard and Shelby Drive were hit hard. Whitehaven has a mix of older single-family homes and commercial properties that have seen disinvestment, creating the kind of environment where opportunistic crime thrives.
Orange Mound, one of Memphis’s oldest African American neighborhoods east of downtown, continued to deal with gun violence concentrated in a relatively small geographic area. The density of incidents in Orange Mound means residents there experience crime at rates far higher than the citywide average.
Hickory Hill, in the southeastern part of the city, saw its own challenges. Once a solidly middle-class suburb, Hickory Hill has seen demographic and economic shifts over the past two decades. The area around Winchester Road and Hickory Hill Road recorded elevated Part 1 crime numbers throughout 2023.
Raleigh, in the northeast, rounded out the five neighborhoods most affected. The Raleigh area’s mix of aging apartment complexes and commercial properties along Austin Peay Highway made it a persistent hotspot.
What’s striking about this list is its stability. These same five neighborhoods have appeared in every annual crime review I’ve written. The geography of violence in Memphis barely changes from year to year. Billions of dollars in federal, state, and local funding have targeted these areas over the past decade. The needle hasn’t moved.
MPD Staffing: The Math Doesn’t Work
Memphis Police Department entered 2023 already short-staffed. The department’s authorized strength is approximately 2,300 sworn officers. By the middle of 2023, the actual number was closer to 1,900. Some estimates put it lower.
Recruiting has been a problem for years, and not just in Memphis. Police departments nationwide have struggled to attract applicants since 2020. In Memphis, the Tyre Nichols case made an already difficult recruiting environment worse. Why would a 23-year-old with options choose a department under DOJ investigation, facing staffing shortages, in one of the most violent cities in America?
The department raised starting pay. It launched marketing campaigns. It tried lateral hiring from other agencies. None of these efforts closed the gap. By the end of 2023, MPD was still running with fewer officers than it needed to adequately patrol a city of 630,000 people spread across 324 square miles.
Fewer officers means slower response times. It means fewer patrols in residential neighborhoods. It means detectives carrying heavier caseloads, which means lower clearance rates, which means fewer arrested suspects, which means less deterrence. The cycle feeds itself.
The homicide clearance rate (the percentage of cases where someone is arrested and charged) dropped in 2023. Exact figures from MPD have been slow to come out, and the department hasn’t published a detailed clearance rate report as of this writing. Nationally, homicide clearance rates have been declining for decades. Memphis’s rate had already fallen below 50 percent before 2023. With more homicides and fewer detectives, the math points in one direction.
The Comparison Nobody Wants to Make
Memphis’s homicide rate of 63.9 per 100,000 puts it in a category with very few American cities. St. Louis, which has traded the “most dangerous city” label with Memphis for years, actually saw its homicide numbers decline in 2023. New Orleans, Jackson (Mississippi), and Baltimore all had high rates, yet Memphis’s per-capita number was among the worst in the country.
The Shelby County Crime Commission tracks Memphis crime against a peer group of similarly sized cities. In 2023, Memphis was an outlier even within that peer group. The 38 percent year-over-year increase in homicides while many comparable cities held steady or improved is difficult to explain through national trends alone. Something specific happened in Memphis.
That something is almost certainly the convergence of multiple factors: SCORPION’s disbanding, the broader de-policing effect, MPD staffing shortages, the DOJ investigation’s chilling effect on proactive enforcement, and underlying socioeconomic conditions that haven’t changed in decades. No single cause is sufficient. All of them together create the 2023 Memphis experienced.
Late-Year Decline: Signal or Noise?
The one genuine bright spot in the data came in the final quarter. October, November, and December 2023 all showed declining crime trends compared to the same months in 2022. Homicides slowed. Vehicle thefts dropped. Some Part 1 categories showed month-over-month improvement.
Is this the beginning of a real turnaround? Or is it seasonal variation that happens every year when colder weather arrives?
Honestly, it’s too early to say. Memphis has historically seen crime dip in colder months and spike in summer. The late-2023 decline could be meaningful if it holds through Q1 of 2024. If homicides jump back up in March and April when temperatures rise, then October’s numbers were just winter doing what winter does.
MPD leadership has pointed to increased patrol deployment in the final months of 2023, along with federal task force operations targeting the most violent offenders. Operation Safe Community, a joint federal-local effort, made significant arrests in late 2023. Those operations may have had a suppressive effect.
The honest assessment: the late-2023 data is encouraging, not conclusive. I’ll have more to say about it in next month’s Q1 analysis.
What the Numbers Don’t Capture
Statistics measure reported crime. They miss the business owner who doesn’t bother filing a police report because nothing came of the last three reports she filed. They miss the resident who moves out of Frayser without telling anyone why. They miss the restaurant that closes at 7 p.m. instead of 10 p.m. because the owner doesn’t feel safe.
These are the invisible costs of a record crime year. Memphis lost tax revenue in 2023 that nobody will ever count. It lost residents who won’t show up in the census for another six years. It lost businesses that quietly relocated to DeSoto County or Tipton County without making the news.
The Memphis Shelby Crime Commission publishes an annual “cost of crime” estimate that attempts to quantify some of these impacts. Their methodology accounts for direct costs (policing, courts, incarceration, medical care) and indirect costs (lost productivity, diminished property values, reduced economic activity). The 2023 figure hasn’t been released yet, yet based on the 2022 estimate of over $5 billion in total costs, the 2023 number will be higher.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I’m not going to pretend there’s a simple answer. Memphis has been trying to solve its violent crime problem for as long as I’ve been covering it, and every year brings a new initiative, a new program, a new promise.
The DOJ investigation will eventually produce findings. Those findings will likely mandate changes in how MPD trains officers, conducts stops, and uses force. Whether those changes reduce crime or make enforcement harder is the central tension Memphis will navigate over the next several years.
MPD needs more officers. That’s not a political statement. It’s arithmetic. A city with 630,000 people and 324 square miles needs more than 1,900 cops to maintain public safety. Getting there requires money, recruiting, training, and a department that good candidates want to join. That last part might be the hardest.
The neighborhoods that bore the worst of 2023’s violence are the same ones that have been struggling for decades. Policing alone didn’t fix Frayser in 2013, and policing alone won’t fix Frayser in 2024. Economic investment, housing stability, education, and employment access all factor in, and none of those change on a one-year timeline.
I’ll be back with our Q1 2024 analysis once the numbers come in. I’d like to write something more optimistic. Whether I can will depend on what Memphis does next.
Three hundred and ninety-eight people. That’s not a statistic. Every single one of them had a name.
Marcus Johnson is the senior editor of Memphis Security Insider. His annual crime reviews have been published every February since 2021. Contact: [email protected].