A woman pulls into a gas station on Winchester Road around 9 p.m. on a Tuesday. She steps out of her car to pump gas. Before the nozzle clicks, two teenagers rush her from behind. One has a handgun. They take her keys, her purse, and her 2019 Nissan Altima. The whole thing takes maybe 12 seconds.
This happened three weeks ago. Nobody was hurt. The car was found two days later, stripped, in a ditch off Shelby Drive.
This kind of thing is happening all over Memphis right now.
The Numbers So Far
Memphis Police haven’t released official carjacking statistics for the first half of 2021, but patrol officers and precinct commanders have been telling anyone who’ll listen that the numbers are ugly. Anecdotally, the spike started in late spring and has gotten worse as temperatures climbed.
Gas stations, parking lots, and drive-throughs are the most common hit spots. Hickory Hill, Whitehaven, and Raleigh have been the hardest-hit areas, though carjackings have popped up in Midtown, East Memphis, and along the Poplar Avenue corridor too.
The suspects are young. Really young. MPD arrested two 15-year-olds in late June in connection with a string of carjackings that ran from late May through the end of the month. The victims included a woman leaving a business who was approached by an armed young man who forced her out of her 2021 Kia Forte at gunpoint.
Fifteen years old. With a handgun. Taking cars at gunpoint on a Wednesday afternoon.
A City Already on Edge
Memphis recorded 332 homicides in 2020, a record. Through the first six months of 2021, the city has already passed 150 homicides and is tracking to beat last year’s total. Aggravated assaults are up. Shootings are up. And now carjackings are piling on top of everything else.
New Police Chief CJ Davis, who took over MPD on June 14, inherited a department with roughly 500 officer vacancies. She’s promised to ramp up recruiting and put more officers on the streets. That’s going to take time nobody really has.
In the meantime, Memphis residents are scared. And businesses are scrambling.
How Gas Stations Are Responding
Drive down Summer Avenue on any given night and count the gas stations with security guards posted outside. A year ago you might have seen one. Now it’s three or four.
I visited five gas stations along Summer Ave and Winchester Road last week. Three of them had armed security on site between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. The other two had recently installed new camera systems and brighter LED lighting in their pump areas.
One station owner on Summer Ave, who asked me not to use his name, said he started hiring security in April after two separate incidents at his pumps. In the first, a customer had his car stolen while he was inside paying. In the second, two armed men jumped a woman in the parking lot and took her SUV.
“I’m paying $30 an hour for an armed guard, eight hours a night, seven days a week,” he said. “That’s almost $7,000 a month. It’s killing my margins. I don’t care. I can’t have my customers getting robbed.”
He told me three of his regular customers stopped coming after the second incident. One of them called and said she’d rather drive ten minutes to a station in Germantown than risk getting carjacked pumping gas.
Parking Lot Patrols Becoming Standard
It isn’t just gas stations. Strip mall owners in Hickory Hill are hiring patrol services to loop their parking lots during evening hours. A property management company that operates several retail centers along Hickory Hill Road told me they’ve contracted mobile patrols for all their properties since May.
“We had three incidents in our lots between March and May,” the property manager said. “Two robberies and a carjacking. Our tenants were threatening to break their leases. We had to do something.”
The security contract runs about $4,500 per month per property. The company manages six retail centers in the Hickory Hill area. That’s $27,000 a month in security costs that didn’t exist before this year.
Restaurants along Poplar Ave have started walking employees to their cars after closing shifts. Two managers I spoke with said they’d implemented buddy-system policies where no employee leaves alone after dark. One restaurant hired a security guard specifically for the 10 p.m. to midnight window when closing staff heads home.
The Convenience Store Problem
Convenience stores have always been soft targets for robbery, but the carjacking element adds a new wrinkle. Thieves aren’t just hitting the register anymore. They’re waiting outside for customers to come out, then taking their vehicles.
A Mapco on Getwell Road installed panic buttons at every register last month. The store manager told me employees have been trained to watch the parking lot cameras and call police if they see anyone loitering near parked cars.
“My cashiers are terrified,” she said. “Two of them quit last month because they don’t feel safe. I can’t blame them.”
She’s looking into hiring overnight security, though she said the cost is hard to justify for a store that does most of its business during daytime hours.
What Businesses Should Be Doing Right Now
Security professionals I’ve talked to this week say there are practical steps every business can take, whether or not they can afford a full-time guard.
Lighting. This is the cheapest and most effective deterrent. Dark parking lots attract criminals. Bright ones don’t. LED retrofit kits for parking lot fixtures cost a few hundred dollars and pay for themselves in reduced incidents. Every security consultant I know says the same thing: light it up.
Cameras. Visible camera systems deter opportunistic crime. They also give police something to work with when a carjacking does happen. High-resolution systems with remote monitoring have come down in price over the past few years. A solid eight-camera setup runs about $2,000-3,000 installed.
Patrol schedules. If you can’t afford a dedicated guard, consider shared patrol services. Several Memphis security companies offer mobile patrol packages where a guard checks your property on a set schedule, usually every 30-60 minutes. It’s cheaper than a full-time post and still provides visible presence.
Employee protocols. Train your staff. No employee should walk to their car alone after dark. Establish closing procedures that account for safety. Have a plan for what to do if a carjacking happens on your property.
Communication with neighbors. Business owners on the same block should be talking to each other. Share information about suspicious activity. Coordinate on security measures. A group of businesses can often negotiate better rates with security companies than any single business can alone.
The Bigger Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
Most of these carjacking suspects are minors. They get arrested, processed through juvenile court, and released. Then they do it again.
That’s not an opinion. Talk to any MPD patrol officer working Hickory Hill or Whitehaven and they’ll tell you they’ve arrested the same kids multiple times for the same types of crimes. The juvenile justice system in Shelby County wasn’t built for this volume, and the consequences aren’t heavy enough to make a 15-year-old with a stolen Glock think twice.
I don’t have a solution for that. Neither does anyone else, apparently.
What I do know is this: Memphis businesses can’t wait for the criminal justice system to figure itself out. They can’t wait for MPD to fill 500 officer vacancies. They need to protect their customers and employees right now, today, with whatever tools they’ve got.
That means better lighting. Better cameras. Better training. And for a lot of businesses, it means hiring private security for the first time in their existence.
The carjacking problem didn’t start this summer. It’s been building for years. The question now is whether businesses will adapt fast enough to keep their customers safe — or whether more people will decide it’s just not worth the risk to stop for gas on the wrong stretch of Winchester Road.
Marcus Johnson covers the Memphis security industry for Memphis Security Insider. Contact him at [email protected].