I walked down Beale Street on a Tuesday afternoon, four days after the shootings. A woman was sweeping the sidewalk outside a bar that had not opened yet. Two cops sat in a cruiser at the corner of Rufus Thomas Boulevard, windows down, not talking to each other. A tourist couple from somewhere that was not Memphis stood on the sidewalk near B.B. King’s, reading a menu like nothing had happened.
Three shootings in four days.
The first two came on the night of March 20, a Thursday, close enough together on the same block that people were still running from the first when the second one cracked off near Rufus Thomas Boulevard. Both left someone hurt. Arrests happened fast on both. Good. Fine. Then on March 24, a Monday, a teenage girl caught a bullet in Tom Lee Park. Not at midnight. Not in some alley off Beale. In the park. In the afternoon. The sun was still up.
I asked the woman sweeping the sidewalk if she had been working the night of the twentieth. She nodded.
“I heard it,” she said. “I was inside, closing up. You hear a pop and you stop and you listen for a second one. There was a second one. Then people started running past the window.”
She did not give me her name. I did not push.
The cops at the corner were not task force. They were Memphis PD, North Main Precinct, and they looked like they had been sitting there for a while. One of them had a coffee from the Mapco on Union. I waved. He waved back. That was the extent of our interaction.
What I kept thinking, walking around that afternoon with nobody paying me any attention, was that the president had been in this city three days after those first two Beale Street shootings. He flew into the Air National Guard base on March 23, stood behind a podium, said the Memphis Safe Task Force was a model for the whole country. Down 43 percent overall. Big numbers. Real numbers. Nobody argued with the numbers. And then on the actual day of his visit, a girl got shot at Tom Lee Park, which is about a ten-minute walk from where I was standing.
“The timing is not lost on anybody,” a security contractor I know told me over the phone later that week. He runs a small operation, six guys, contracts for two properties in the South Main area. “You got the president saying we are winning. You got three shootings in the district where we are supposed to be winning the most.”
His phone had been ringing since that Thursday night, he said. Property managers wanting to know if their rates are going up. Event planners asking whether they need more bodies at the door. A restaurant owner on South Main who wanted to know if his patio insurance covers a shooting that happens on the public sidewalk six feet from his tables. All these people calling a guy with six employees like he has the answers.
“What I tell every single one of them is the same thing,” he said. “You are responsible for your door. Your property line. That is where it starts and that is where it stops. I can’t control Beale Street. The city can barely control Beale Street.”
Three different people told me some version of that same speech by Friday.
Nobody was talking enough about the curfew part. Chief Davis went in front of the City Council on March 24, the same day as the Tom Lee Park shooting, and she did not soften what she said. Teenagers are bringing weapons downtown. Her officers do not have a clean way to handle it. And then she asked the room a question that sat there for a beat: “How do we discover weapons on young people that come to our downtown space without searching everybody?”
She was not being philosophical. She was asking the Memphis City Council to tell her what to do.
Mayor Young said something similar after the Trump roundtable. He called it “unacceptable” to have fourteen-year-olds on Beale Street at eleven-thirty at night, near bars and adult activities. He said the city was exploring curfew enforcement again. The word “again” is doing heavy lifting in that sentence. Memphis has had a curfew ordinance on the books since 1996. It has been dusted off, discussed, partially implemented, and shelved at least three times since 2023.
The last attempt, in April 2023, never got off the ground. MPD drafted a plan to take curfew violators to Greenlaw Community Center. Within a month, the whole thing was paused. The sticking point then is the sticking point now: you pick up a thirteen-year-old on Beale Street at midnight, you need somewhere to put them until a parent shows up. Memphis does not have that somewhere.
Davis told the Council that nine-year-olds do not belong in the back seat of a patrol car. She is right. Nobody disagrees. The disagreement is about what comes next.
A private security supervisor I talked to, a guy who has worked the entertainment district under three different contracts over the past six years, put it this way: “We are not cops. We do not have arrest authority. We do not do pat-downs on minors. What we do is get on the radio and say we got a juvenile with something in his waistband. And then we wait.”
He said the wait can be ten minutes. It can be forty-five. It depends on the night, the staffing, whether something bigger is happening somewhere else in the precinct.
“You try explaining that to a restaurant owner,” he said. “Forty-five minutes.”
The data underneath all of this is ugly, and nobody wants to say it out loud. Fox 13 pulled the numbers this week and the trend line is not going the direction anyone in city government wants it to go. Sixty-two Part 1 crimes per day in January. Almost seventy per day in February. Almost seventy-six per day so far in March. Month over month, it is climbing. The year-to-date total is still below this time last year, which was a historically low year, so you can tell two completely different stories with the exact same spreadsheet. Crime is down from 2025. Crime is also going up every single month of 2026.
Both of those are true. Pick the one that matches what you are trying to sell.
Both Young and Davis said it out loud this week, which is unusual for politicians: warmer weather brings more crime. Always has. Always will. The task force started operations in September, caught the tail end of fall, got the full winter dip when people stay inside and shoot each other less often, and has racked up more than seven thousand three hundred arrests in that window. Huge numbers. Cold-weather numbers.
“Call me in July,” the contractor said. “That is when we find out if any of this sticks.”
I walked back up Beale toward Second Street. The tourist couple was gone. The sweeping woman was gone. A Securitas guard in a vest stood near the entrance to a parking garage that connects to the Orpheum block, watching his phone. Two National Guard vehicles were parked on Riverside Drive, which runs along the park where the girl was shot two days earlier. The soldiers inside looked bored. The river was high and brown.
The metal detectors were not up that afternoon. They come and they go. Entry fees. Pat-downs. Barricades. Expanded pedestrian corridors. Beale Street has tried all of it at one point or another over the past five years, rotating through security measures the way a landlord keeps trying different locks on the same door that keeps getting kicked in.
“We have been doing this for five years,” the security supervisor told me when I called him back. He meant the cycle. Shooting. Headlines. New security plan. Plan fades. Shooting. Headlines.
I asked him if he thought the curfew would actually happen this time.
“They need a building,” he said. “A real building. Not a plan. A building. With staff. And a phone number parents can call. Until they have that, they do not have a curfew. They have a press conference.”
The Mapco coffee cop was still sitting in the cruiser when I walked past. Windows up now. The March air had turned cool, the way it does around four o’clock this time of year when the sun drops behind the taller buildings on Main.
I sat in my car for a minute. Two guys were unloading a keg from a delivery truck outside a restaurant that opens at five. A Guard Humvee rolled past them heading south on Main Street, real slow, like whoever was driving had nowhere particular to be and was fine with that.
The curfew ordinance has been on the books for thirty years. The city still does not have a building to take kids to. Spring is a week old.