A woman was loading groceries into her Honda Accord in the Kroger parking lot on Poplar Avenue last Tuesday when two teenagers ran up on her from behind. One grabbed her keys. The other shoved her into the side of the car. They were gone before she could finish dialing 911. The whole thing took nine seconds.
This is happening across Memphis with alarming frequency, and it’s accelerating as the holiday season picks up.
Carjackings in the city have been climbing all year. MPD data through October shows the count already exceeding full-year totals from recent years, and November is shaping up worse. The crime is concentrated in specific corridors: the Poplar Avenue stretch between Highland and Perkins, the shopping centers along Germantown Parkway, the Hickory Hill area south of Winchester, and scattered incidents through Whitehaven and Frayser. Parking lots at retail centers, grocery stores, and strip malls are the most common settings. If you manage a commercial property in Memphis right now, this trend is your problem whether you want it to be or not.
Why Parking Lots
The answer is depressingly simple. Parking lots offer everything a carjacker wants: distracted victims, running engines, multiple escape routes, and very few witnesses willing to intervene.
Think about the moment you walk out of a store. Your hands are full of bags. You’re looking at your phone. You’re fishing for your keys or waiting for your car to unlock with the fob. You’re mentally checked out, already thinking about your next stop or what you’re making for dinner. For someone watching from three rows over, you’re the easiest target in the city.
Memphis shopping centers present a particularly attractive environment for this crime. Most of them were built in the 1980s and 1990s, designed for maximum parking capacity with minimal thought given to security. The Oak Court Mall lot has dozens of blind spots created by its tiered layout. The strip malls along Hickory Hill Road have lighting so dim you can barely read a license plate after 5 p.m. The sprawling lots around Wolfchase Galleria give a car thief open road in every direction once they pull out of the space.
And the victims don’t fit a single profile. In the past three months, MPD reports show carjacking victims ranging from college students at the University of Memphis to retirees at the Walgreens on Quince Road. Men and women. Day and night, though after-dark incidents are more common.
The Connection to Broader Violence
You can’t talk about carjackings without talking about what’s happening in Memphis more broadly. The city is on pace for more than 330 homicides by the end of 2020, which would obliterate the previous record of roughly 228. Aggravated assaults are up. Armed robberies are up. The entire violent crime picture has darkened this year, and carjackings are part of that wave.
MPD Director Michael Rallings has pointed to the pandemic as a contributing factor. Courts shut down for months. Thousands of suspects were released from the Shelby County jail to reduce COVID transmission risk. Juvenile detention followed similar patterns. The result, critics say, is a population of repeat offenders cycling through the system faster than the system can process them.
The carjacking spike also tracks with a nationwide trend. Cities from Chicago to New Orleans to Minneapolis have reported sharp increases in carjackings during 2020. The pandemic hollowed out commercial districts, reducing the natural surveillance that comes from foot traffic and open businesses. Fewer eyes on the street means more opportunity for this kind of fast, violent crime.
Still, Memphis has it worse than most. The city’s auto theft numbers were already among the highest per capita in the country before COVID. The carjacking surge is layered on top of an existing crisis.
What Property Managers Can Do
If you own or manage a retail center, office park, or apartment complex in Shelby County, you’ve probably already gotten calls from tenants asking what you’re doing about parking lot safety. Here’s what actually works, based on conversations with security consultants and property managers who’ve been dealing with this problem all year.
Lighting comes first. It’s the cheapest, most effective deterrent available. Several Memphis property managers I spoke with have upgraded to LED fixtures in the past six months, not for the energy savings (though those are real) but because the brighter, whiter light eliminates the shadows that carjackers rely on. The parking lot at Laurelwood Shopping Center on Poplar got a full lighting retrofit in the summer. Management there says after-hours incidents have dropped since the upgrade, though they couldn’t give me exact numbers.
Camera systems matter, with caveats. Cameras don’t prevent crime in the moment. A camera isn’t going to stop someone from running up on a driver at the Walgreen’s on Union. What cameras do is provide evidence for MPD investigations and, when paired with visible signage, create the perception of surveillance. The perception is often enough. Modern systems with license plate recognition (LPR) technology are particularly useful because they can flag stolen vehicles entering the lot before an incident even happens. That said, a camera system is only as good as the monitoring behind it. Recorded footage nobody watches until after a crime occurs is of limited value.
Security patrols remain the gold standard. A marked patrol vehicle doing regular loops through a parking lot changes the calculation for a carjacker. The uniformed presence signals that someone is watching, and the vehicle provides rapid response capability if something does happen. The cost varies widely in Memphis, from $18 to $30 an hour depending on the company and whether you want armed or unarmed officers. That’s a real line item for a strip mall owner already getting squeezed by COVID-related vacancies. Several property managers told me they’re splitting patrol costs with their tenants, which spreads the burden and gets buy-in from the businesses that benefit.
Panic buttons and emergency call stations used to be standard in mall parking garages. Most surface lots never got them. Installing them now isn’t cheap (roughly $3,000 to $5,000 per unit installed), and response time depends entirely on who’s monitoring the other end. They’re most useful when connected directly to a security dispatch center or an on-site guard shack rather than routing through 911.
MPD Is Stretched Thin
Here’s the uncomfortable reality that nobody in city government wants to say out loud: Memphis police don’t have the resources to patrol private parking lots. MPD is handling a record homicide caseload with roughly the same number of officers it had five years ago. Patrol zones are enormous. Response times for non-emergency calls, including property crimes, can stretch past 45 minutes in some precincts.
Director Rallings has repeatedly asked the city council for more funding and more officers. The council has other priorities. COVID decimated the city’s tax revenue. The result is a department that’s triaging calls, focusing on the most violent crimes, and leaving property security largely to the private sector.
For business owners, the message is clear: don’t count on MPD to protect your parking lot. That’s not a criticism of the department. It’s an honest assessment of their bandwidth. If you want proactive security in your lot, you’re paying for it yourself.
Insurance Implications
There’s a financial angle here that catches property owners off guard. If a customer gets carjacked in your parking lot and sues, your liability exposure depends heavily on what you did (or didn’t do) to provide adequate security. Tennessee courts have historically held that property owners have a duty to protect invitees from foreseeable criminal acts. “Foreseeable” is the key word. When carjackings in your zip code are climbing by double digits year over year, arguing that the crime wasn’t foreseeable becomes a tough sell.
Several Memphis insurance brokers told me they’ve seen commercial property premiums tick up in 2020, partly driven by the violent crime surge. Some carriers are now asking specific questions about parking lot security measures during the underwriting process: Do you have cameras? Do you have patrols? What’s your lighting situation? The answers affect your premium.
One broker on Ridgeway Road put it bluntly: “If you’re managing a property in the 38115 or 38118 zip code and you don’t have documented security measures, you’re going to have a hard time finding affordable coverage next renewal.”
The Holiday Factor
All of this gets worse over the next five weeks. Holiday shoppers carry more merchandise. They’re more distracted. Parking lots are fuller, which paradoxically makes them both safer (more witnesses) and more dangerous (more targets, easier to blend in). The early-dark evenings don’t help. Sunset in Memphis this week was at 4:48 p.m. By the time most people finish their after-work shopping, it’s been dark for hours.
Thanksgiving weekend will be the first real test. With Black Friday looking different this year because of COVID restrictions, the shopping rush is spreading out across more days, which means more evenings of heightened risk rather than one concentrated burst.
Property managers along the Germantown Parkway corridor and in the Poplar-Perkins area told me they’re adding evening patrol hours through January. A few are posting off-duty MPD officers at their entrances during peak hours, a common practice in Memphis that typically costs $35 to $50 an hour per officer.
The carjacking problem in Memphis didn’t start in 2020, and it won’t end when the calendar flips. What’s changed is the volume and the brazenness. These aren’t late-night crimes in empty lots anymore. They’re happening at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday in front of a grocery store full of shoppers. That shift demands a different kind of response from every business owner with a parking lot and a customer base.
The ones who invest now in lighting, cameras, and patrols will sleep better. The ones who don’t will eventually have a conversation with their insurance company that they’d rather avoid.