Three shootings in Frayser before noon on Tuesday. A double homicide in Hickory Hill Wednesday night. By Thursday morning, the count was somewhere past 155, and summer hadn’t even hit its worst stretch yet.
Memphis is on pace to break its own homicide record this year. The previous high, set just last year at 332, already felt like a number that shouldn’t be possible. In 2021, the city could blow past it by Thanksgiving. And for anyone running a business, managing a property, or trying to keep a congregation safe in Shelby County, the math isn’t abstract. It’s showing up in break-in reports, shooting incidents within earshot of storefronts, and a growing realization that calling 911 doesn’t mean help arrives fast.
The Numbers Are Ugly
By mid-July, Memphis had recorded more than 150 homicides. Last year, the city didn’t cross that mark until late August. The acceleration is real, and it isn’t spread evenly across the map.
Frayser keeps topping the list. The neighborhood north of I-40 has seen clusters of violence week after week, and residents there will tell you the police presence hasn’t kept up. Whitehaven, down along Elvis Presley Blvd, has had its own string of shootings near retail strips where business owners are already struggling to recover from last year’s COVID shutdowns. Hickory Hill, Raleigh, Orange Mound: the same names keep coming up in every crime briefing.
The heat makes it worse. Memphis in July is 95 degrees with humidity that sits on your chest. Research going back decades connects high temperatures to higher rates of violent crime, and anyone who’s lived here long enough doesn’t need a study to confirm it. People are outside longer. Tempers run shorter. The city’s post-COVID rebound has put more people back on the streets after a year of lockdown isolation, and the social friction that comes with that is showing up in the numbers.
MPD reported 55 homicides by the end of February alone. They were already ahead of 2020’s pace before the trees had leaves.
MPD Can’t Be Everywhere
Here’s the part that doesn’t get enough attention in the nightly news coverage: Memphis Police Department is hemorrhaging officers. The department has hundreds of vacancies it can’t fill. Recruiting classes are smaller than they’ve been in years, retirements are up, and lateral transfers to suburban departments in Collierville, Bartlett, and Germantown keep thinning the ranks.
Director Michael Rallings has called it a national problem, and he’s not wrong. Departments across the country are struggling to recruit after 2020. Still, the local impact is specific and measurable. Response times in high-crime precincts are stretching. When a business owner on Summer Ave calls about a break-in, the wait might be 45 minutes. When it’s a non-emergency theft report in Raleigh, it might be hours.
That gap between “I need help” and “help arrives” is where private security companies are building their business right now.
The Phone Calls Started in April
Talk to any mid-size security company in Memphis and they’ll tell you the same thing: the phones picked up around April and haven’t stopped.
Property management companies are calling about apartment complexes where tenants are threatening to break leases over safety concerns. Churches in Orange Mound and Whitehaven want armed guards for Sunday services after a shooting near a congregation made local news in May. Strip mall owners along the Summer Ave corridor, the ones who survived COVID closures, are now dealing with parking lot robberies that scare off the customers they just got back.
“We’ve had more inquiries in the last three months than all of last year,” one operations manager at a Memphis-based security firm told me. He asked not to be named because his company is negotiating several new contracts. “It’s not just the big corporate clients anymore. It’s barbershops. It’s daycares. People who never thought they’d need a guard.”
The demand isn’t limited to armed officers, though that’s the fastest-growing category. Businesses along Elvis Presley Blvd are asking about visible patrol vehicles, the kind that sit in a parking lot with their lights on as a deterrent. Apartment complexes in Hickory Hill want gate guards and roving patrols. Even some residential HOAs in east Memphis are pooling money for overnight security in neighborhoods where car break-ins have tripled.
The Economics of Hiring Private Security
So what does it actually cost to put a guard on your property in Memphis right now?
For an unarmed officer doing basic access control or front-desk duty, you’re looking at $18 to $24 per hour through a contract security company. That’s the billed rate, not what the guard takes home. The company’s margin covers insurance, training, uniforms, supervision, and the overhead of staying TDCI-licensed in Tennessee.
Armed officers cost more. Expect $25 to $35 per hour depending on the company, the location, and the shift. Overnight and weekend rates run higher. If you want an off-duty MPD officer, the rate can hit $45 to $55 per hour, and good luck finding one who’s available. Most off-duty cops who moonlight in security are already booked solid through existing contracts with hospitals, hotels, and the bigger retail chains.
For a small business owner on Summer Ave who needs eight hours of coverage five days a week, that’s roughly $3,700 to $5,000 a month for unarmed. Armed pushes it past $5,200. Those numbers make some owners flinch, especially the ones still catching up on pandemic-era rent.
The counterargument from security companies is straightforward: what does a break-in cost you? What does it cost when your employees don’t feel safe and quit? What happens to your insurance premiums after the third incident report?
Property managers are doing similar math. A 200-unit apartment complex in Whitehaven paying $4,500 a month for a security patrol can spread that across units at roughly $22.50 per apartment. Some managers are rolling it into rent increases. Others are eating the cost and calling it a retention expense, because replacing a tenant who breaks their lease costs far more than $22.50 a month.
Churches, Too
The church security conversation in Memphis has shifted in the past year. Before 2020, most congregations relied on volunteer ushers and maybe a deacon who carried. Now, after a string of incidents near houses of worship in South Memphis and Orange Mound, the requests are for trained, armed professionals.
One security company owner who works with several Memphis churches described the change as sudden. “Two years ago, pastors would say they were praying about it. Now they’re asking me for quotes before I finish my pitch.”
The tricky part with church security is the budget. Most congregations can’t afford full-time coverage. They’re looking for Sunday morning and Wednesday evening, maybe special events. That creates scheduling headaches for security companies trying to staff those exact same peak hours across multiple clients.
Some firms are offering package deals: four hours on Sunday, two on Wednesday, plus a security assessment of the property. Walk-throughs of parking lots, lighting audits, camera placement recommendations. The assessments are often free or low-cost, because they almost always lead to a contract.
A Dangerous Mix
There’s no single explanation for where Memphis is right now. It’s a combination that feeds on itself.
The COVID rebound put people back into public spaces after a year of relative isolation. Social services and community programs that paused during the pandemic haven’t all come back. MPD is short-staffed by hundreds of officers with no quick fix in sight. The summer heat is piling on.
And underneath all of it, the guns. Memphis has always had a gun problem, and the flow of firearms hasn’t slowed. The ATF’s Memphis field office has been tracking weapons trafficking along the I-40 and I-55 corridors for years, and the volume is up.
For private security companies, this is a business opportunity. For everyone else, it’s a question of how much safety you can afford to buy while the city figures out its long-term strategy.
The honest answer: there isn’t a long-term strategy right now. There’s a police department doing its best with fewer officers, a city government scrambling for solutions, and a summer that still has two months of heat left.
September feels like a long way off.