On a Tuesday evening in early March, about 40 people crowded into the fellowship hall at First Congregational Church on South Cooper Street. The meeting had been organized by the Cooper-Young Community Association, and the agenda was one item long: safety. Residents who two years ago would have called MPD and waited were now asking a different question. Not “when will the police come?” They were asking, “what else can we do?”
This scene is repeating itself across Memphis. In church basements, at business association meetings, on Nextdoor threads, and in the parking lots of strip malls, Memphians are having the same conversation. The Tyre Nichols killing didn’t just disband a police unit. It cracked open a decades-old assumption: that public safety in Memphis is primarily a police function. What’s emerging in its place isn’t a rejection of policing. It’s something more complicated and, possibly, more durable.
The Cooper-Young Model
Cooper-Young has always been one of Memphis’s more organized neighborhoods. The community association has been active since the 1980s, running the annual Cooper-Young Festival, maintaining the neighborhood gateway signs, and coordinating with MPD on crime prevention. The neighborhood sits in Midtown, bounded roughly by Southern Avenue, Central Avenue, East Parkway, and Cooper Street. It’s a mix of historic bungalows, local restaurants, and small businesses that gives the area a walkable, village feel.
After the SCORPION disbandment, the association’s safety committee started meeting twice a month instead of quarterly. Their February meeting drew the largest attendance in years. The immediate concern was a spike in vehicle break-ins along Cooper Street and in the parking lots behind restaurants and bars on Young Avenue. MPD’s “Operation Broken Bottles,” a targeted enforcement effort against smash-and-grab crews, had produced arrests in 2022, but residents worried the effort would lose momentum with departmental resources stretched thin.
The association’s response has been layered. They’ve expanded their existing neighborhood watch, recruiting block captains for streets that didn’t have them. They’ve installed additional Ring cameras through a cost-sharing arrangement with residents. And they’ve begun soliciting bids from private security companies for weekend evening patrols along the commercial corridor.
That last part is new. Cooper-Young has never hired its own private security. The fact that they’re considering it tells you how much the ground has shifted.
Business Districts Pool Resources
The pattern isn’t limited to residential neighborhoods. Memphis’s business improvement districts and commercial corridors are rethinking their security spending.
The Downtown Memphis Commission, which oversees the Center City Revenue Finance Corporation and manages services for the downtown core, has maintained a safety presence for years through its Downtown Safety Patrol. The team, which includes unarmed ambassadors and security personnel, patrols Main Street, Beale Street, and the area around AutoZone Park. After January, the DMC expanded patrol hours and added coverage along the South Main arts district, where foot traffic from restaurants and galleries has increased since COVID.
The DMC model is interesting because it doesn’t replace police. It layers on top of them. Downtown ambassadors handle quality-of-life issues: giving directions, reporting broken streetlights, asking panhandlers to move along. Security personnel handle escalated situations and coordinate with MPD for anything requiring law enforcement authority. It’s an approach that other business districts in the city are starting to study.
Along the Broad Avenue Arts District in Binghampton, business owners have been talking about a similar shared security arrangement. Broad Avenue’s revitalization over the past decade turned a struggling commercial strip into one of Memphis’s trendiest corridors, with restaurants like Bounty on Broad and shops like Five in One Social Club drawing crowds on weekends. The foot traffic is good for business and good for property values. It also creates targets.
Three business owners on Broad Avenue told me separately in February that they’d had conversations about splitting the cost of a Friday and Saturday night patrol. The economics work on paper. Eight businesses contributing $200 to $300 per month each could fund a visible security presence for 20 to 24 hours of weekend coverage. The question they’re working through is logistics: who manages the contract, who decides the patrol routes, and how do you hold a security company accountable when nobody’s technically the boss?
These are the same questions every shared-security arrangement eventually hits. The businesses that figure it out first will set the template for others.
Churches Step Into the Gap
Memphis has always been a church town. The city’s faith institutions have served as community anchors for generations, providing food banks, youth programs, job training, and meeting space for neighborhood organizing. What’s newer is churches getting directly involved in safety coordination.
In Whitehaven, a coalition of three Baptist churches along Elvis Presley Boulevard launched a “Safe Streets” program in February. Volunteers from the congregations drive designated routes on Friday and Saturday nights, checking on elderly homebound members, noting suspicious activity, and maintaining a visible presence. They wear reflective vests and carry walkie-talkies. They don’t carry weapons and they don’t confront anyone. If they see something, they call 911 and they call each other.
The program was inspired by similar faith-based safety initiatives in other cities, particularly the “Cure Violence” model that uses community members to interrupt conflicts before they escalate. Memphis actually had a Cure Violence program called 901 BLOC Squad operating in parts of the city, funded through a combination of city and private dollars. The church coalition in Whitehaven isn’t formally connected to 901 BLOC Squad, but there’s informal coordination.
In Frayser, the Frayser Community Development Corporation has been the connective tissue holding neighborhood safety efforts together for years. Since January, their work has intensified. Executive Director Steve Lockwood (who’s been running the CDC since 2016) has been coordinating between church groups, block clubs, and MPD’s Frayser precinct to ensure that volunteer safety efforts don’t conflict with police operations. The last thing anyone wants is a well-meaning citizen patrol interfering with an active investigation.
The challenge for church-based safety programs is sustainability. Volunteers burn out. Weekend patrols feel urgent in March when the Nichols case is still fresh. By July, when it’s 95 degrees at 9 p.m. and the news cycle has moved on, keeping those same volunteers on the road gets harder.
The Emerging Mixed Model
What Memphis is building, whether anyone planned it this way or not, is a mixed model of public safety. Police provide the backbone: responding to 911 calls, investigating crimes, making arrests. Private security fills specific gaps, especially in commercial areas and apartment complexes where consistent presence matters more than rapid response. And community organizations handle the in-between spaces, the neighborhood streets, the church parking lots, the stretches of road where crime happens because nobody is watching.
This isn’t new nationally. Cities like Atlanta, Detroit, and Oakland have operated with variations of this model for decades. What’s different about Memphis in spring 2023 is the speed of the shift. The Nichols case compressed a transition that might have taken five to ten years into two months.
The private security industry in Memphis is feeling the acceleration. Companies I’ve spoken with report a noticeable uptick in inquiries since February. Not all of those inquiries convert to contracts. Shared security arrangements take time to organize. Neighborhood associations need to raise funds and agree on terms. Business districts need board approval.
Still, the direction is clear. Memphis’s Shelby County Crime Commission has tracked private security employment in the county for years, and the numbers have been trending upward since 2019. The post-SCORPION environment is accelerating that trend.
What Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s the tension that most of these community safety meetings haven’t addressed yet: who sets the rules for private security patrols in residential neighborhoods?
When MPD patrols a neighborhood, officers operate under department policy, city oversight, and constitutional constraints on stops and searches. When a private security guard patrols the same block, the legal framework is different. Private security personnel in Tennessee are governed by TDCI regulations, which cover licensing and training, but they don’t include the same use-of-force reporting requirements or civilian oversight mechanisms that apply to police.
A neighborhood association that hires a patrol company is essentially becoming a client, not a citizen. The relationship is contractual. If a guard uses excessive force on a resident, the remedy is a lawsuit, not an Internal Affairs investigation. There’s no civilian review board for private security in Memphis or anywhere in Tennessee.
This gap matters because the same communities that just watched five SCORPION officers get charged with murder are now hiring private guards to patrol their streets. The oversight mechanisms they’re asking for in policing don’t exist in the private sector. At some point, that contradiction will need addressing.
TDCI’s new training requirements that took effect January 1 are a step. Armed guards requalifying every two years and unarmed guards completing refresher training adds a baseline of accountability. Whether it’s enough depends on what happens on the ground.
Where This Goes Next
Memphis will figure this out the way Memphis figures most things out: neighborhood by neighborhood, conversation by conversation, with more energy than coordination and more heart than budget.
The communities that succeed will be the ones that build relationships between all three legs of the model: police, private security, and residents. Cooper-Young has the organizational infrastructure. Downtown has the funding. Frayser has the community networks. Whitehaven has the churches.
What none of them have yet is a template. Nobody’s written the playbook for how a mid-sized Southern city rebuilds its safety architecture after a high-profile police killing.
Memphis is writing it in real time, one Tuesday night church meeting at a time.