Three weeks into February, and every conversation in Memphis eventually lands on the same topic. At the City Council meeting on February 7, Council members spent over two hours discussing police oversight, use-of-force policies, and whether Memphis needs an independent civilian review board. Community forums at churches in Whitehaven and Hickory Hill have drawn standing-room crowds. The NAACP and local civil rights organizations are calling for the U.S. Department of Justice to open a pattern-or-practice investigation into the Memphis Police Department.
Police reform is the phrase of the moment. For private security companies operating in Shelby County, the question nobody in the reform conversation is addressing is this: if police scale back aggressive enforcement, does private security fill the vacuum? And if it does, what are the legal boundaries?
The answer is more complicated than either side of the debate wants to admit.
The Reform Menu
The proposals circulating in Memphis right now fall into three general categories.
The first is accountability. This includes creating a civilian oversight board with subpoena power, requiring body cameras on all officers during every encounter, establishing an independent use-of-force review process, and publishing complaint data publicly. Several Council members have expressed support. The Memphis Police Association has not.
The second category is operational change. This means revising MPD’s use-of-force continuum, banning certain restraint techniques, requiring de-escalation training, and implementing early-warning systems that flag officers with repeated complaints before those complaints become national news. Chief Davis has indicated MPD is already reviewing its policies.
The third is structural investigation. Several members of Congress and multiple civil rights organizations have formally requested that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division open an investigation into MPD. A pattern-or-practice investigation, if launched, would examine whether the department engages in systemic constitutional violations. These investigations typically take 18 to 24 months and sometimes end in consent decrees that place departments under federal oversight for years.
Each of these tracks has different implications for the private security industry. The accountability measures are mostly internal to MPD. The operational changes could alter how police interact with private security on shared scenes. The DOJ track could reshape the entire enforcement posture of the department for a decade.
The Pullback Effect
Here’s what history tells us about police departments under reform pressure: officers pull back. It’s not official policy. No chief issues a directive telling officers to stop being proactive. It happens organically. Officers who fear being the next viral video reduce discretionary stops. They respond to 911 calls and write reports. They don’t go hunting for the gun in the waistband or the drugs in the glove compartment.
Criminologists call this the “Ferguson effect,” named after the 2014 crisis in Missouri. Research on whether it actually increases crime is mixed, with studies pointing in both directions. What isn’t debatable is that police activity metrics drop: fewer stops, fewer searches, fewer low-level arrests.
In Memphis, where MPD is already short several hundred officers from its authorized strength, a pullback effect on top of existing understaffing could be significant. The neighborhoods that relied on SCORPION patrols, places like Hickory Hill, Parkway Village, and the stretch of Winchester Road between Mendenhall and Perkins, would feel it most acutely.
Private security can’t replace police in those areas. Not legally, and not practically. What security companies can do is fill a specific, limited role: protecting fixed locations. A guard at an apartment complex entrance. A patrol car circling a strip mall parking lot. A uniformed presence at a gas station between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. That’s the boundary.
Tennessee Law: What Private Security Can and Cannot Do
This is where the conversation gets precise, and where it needs to. Tennessee’s Private Protective Services Act, codified at T.C.A. Section 62-35-101 and following sections, defines what private security personnel are authorized to do.
Licensed security guards in Tennessee can observe and report. They can ask people to leave private property. They can detain someone they personally witness committing a crime on the property they’re protecting, under the state’s citizen’s arrest provisions. Armed guards who hold valid handgun carry permits can carry firearms while on duty.
What they cannot do is extensive. They cannot conduct traffic stops. They cannot execute search warrants. They cannot pursue suspects off the property they’re assigned to. They cannot use force beyond what a private citizen would be legally justified in using. They have no qualified immunity. Every use of force by a private security guard is evaluated under the same legal standard that applies to any civilian.
The risk for the Memphis security market right now is scope creep. When businesses and property managers feel abandoned by police, they sometimes expect their security provider to fill the gap entirely. A property manager in Parkway Village who’s used to seeing SCORPION officers chase down a car thief outside his complex might expect the security guard he just hired to do the same thing. That guard can’t, and shouldn’t.
“The biggest liability issue we face right now is client expectations,” one Memphis security company owner told me. “People are signing contracts and asking us to do things that are not in our scope of authority. We have to be really clear about what a guard is and what a guard isn’t.”
Perspectives From Different Sides
I spent last week talking to people across the spectrum on this issue.
A retired MPD lieutenant who now does consulting for commercial properties in East Memphis put it bluntly: “Reform is fine. Oversight is fine. I’m for all of it. Just understand that when you reform a police department mid-crisis, there’s a transition period where nobody’s covering the gap. That’s where you are right now in Memphis. The bad guys know it, too.”
A community organizer in Frayser who has been pushing for police accountability for years had a different take: “We’ve been asking for oversight since before SCORPION existed. What happened to Tyre Nichols didn’t happen because we had too little policing. It happened because we had the wrong kind of policing. I don’t want private security to become the next version of that problem.”
A TDCI compliance officer, speaking on background, raised the regulatory angle: “If demand for private security increases significantly in Memphis, we’re going to see more applications, and we’re going to see more companies that are brand new trying to get licensed. Our job is to make sure the training requirements don’t get watered down in a rush to fill posts.”
A Hickory Hill business owner who runs a tire shop on Knight Arnold Road summed up where most small operators seem to land: “I don’t care who’s doing it. Police, security guard, National Guard. I need someone visible on this corner after dark. My employee got carjacked in November in my own parking lot. Whatever the reform is, it needs to include a plan for places like mine.”
The Overstepping Risk
The scenario that should concern everyone in the private security industry is the one where reform-driven police pullback leads to private security expanding beyond its legal authority, and someone gets hurt.
It’s not hypothetical. After police pullbacks in other cities, there have been cases of security guards chasing suspects into public streets, conducting searches without authority, and using force in situations where they had no legal right to do so. The lawsuits that follow are devastating. A security company can lose its TDCI license over a single guard making a bad decision on a Wednesday night.
Tennessee’s licensing framework exists specifically to prevent this. The 48-hour training requirement for armed guards, the background checks, the continuing education requirements: all of it is designed to ensure that private security operates within defined boundaries.
The system works when demand grows gradually and companies have time to hire, train, and supervise properly. It gets strained when demand spikes overnight and companies are scrambling to put bodies on posts.
What Smart Operators Are Doing Now
The security companies I’ve talked to that seem best positioned for this moment share a few common traits. They’re being explicit with clients about scope of authority. They’re putting the legal limitations in writing, in the contract itself. They’re increasing supervisor check-ins at posts in high-crime areas. And they’re documenting everything.
“If we’re going to be the visible presence in neighborhoods where police used to be the visible presence, we have to be better documented, better trained, and more professional than we’ve ever been,” one company owner said. “Because the first time a private security guard does something wrong in Memphis right now, it won’t just be a lawsuit. It’ll be national news.”
That’s probably not an exaggeration. Memphis is under a spotlight that won’t dim for months, maybe years. Every institution in the city, from MPD to City Council to the private security companies filling the spaces that police vacated, will be watched more closely than they’re accustomed to.
For the security industry in Memphis, this moment is a test. Not of whether demand will grow. It will. The test is whether the industry can grow responsibly while a city figures out what it wants its police to be.