Sixty-two Part 1 crimes per day in January. Almost seventy in February. Seventy-six by March.
Those are Memphis Police Department numbers, reported by Chief CJ Davis and confirmed by a Fox13 investigation that aired last week. Read them again. Each month in 2026 has been worse than the one before it.
If you manage security contracts in Shelby County, you already feel this. Your clients are asking different questions than they were asking in January. The calls are not about whether they need security. The calls are about whether they need more of it.
The Year-Over-Year Illusion
One number dominates every press conference and every city council briefing: Part 1 crimes in January 2026 came in at 1,915, down from 3,709 the same month in 2025. That is a 48 percent drop. It is real. Nobody disputes it.
The Memphis Safe Task Force, which the White House credits for much of the decline, has logged more than 7,000 arrests and seized over 1,100 firearms since it launched. Those are significant numbers, and they show up in the data. Homicides are down from 43 at this point last year to 31 as of late March. Motor vehicle thefts dropped from 1,426 reports to 445. The White House issued a statement in March calling it a “crushing blow to crime.”
All true. And all potentially misleading if you’re trying to plan staffing for Q2.
Year-over-year tells you where Memphis stands relative to its worst period. Month-over-month tells you where it’s headed. Two different questions. Two very different answers right now, and the one your clients are asking about at their next board meeting is not the one the White House put in a press release.
What the Monthly Numbers Actually Show
January averaged 62 Part 1 crimes per day. February pushed that to almost 70. March hit 76.
That is a 22 percent increase in daily crime volume across three months. Not year over year. Within 2026 itself.
Some of that is seasonal. Crime always rises in Memphis between January and May. The cold keeps people inside. Warmer weather brings them out, and property crime, car break-ins, and aggravated assaults climb with the temperature. Anyone who has worked security in this city for more than two years knows the pattern. You staff up for spring. You watch the overnight numbers starting in March. You hope the summer isn’t worse.
Seasonal noise, or something else? Because the task force is still operating. The National Guard presence hasn’t changed. Federal resources are still flowing. If crime is climbing even with all of that in place, the summer projections get uncomfortable fast.
What Security Operators Are Seeing on the Ground
Talk to anybody running overnight patrols in Hickory Hill or Whitehaven and you get a version of the same conversation.
January was quiet. Abnormally quiet, the kind of quiet that makes experienced operators nervous because they’ve seen what comes after it. One contract security company owner I spoke with last week, a guy who manages armed patrol routes across six commercial properties in southeast Shelby County, said his overnight incident reports in January were the lowest he’d seen in four years. Lowest in four years. He didn’t celebrate.
Third week of February, his incident count started creeping. Car break-in attempts at a strip mall near Getwell and Shelby Drive. A trespassing pattern at a vacant property off Raines Road that hadn’t seen activity in months. Nothing dramatic, nothing that makes the local news at ten. Low-level property crime. The kind that, if you’ve been doing this long enough, you recognize as a leading indicator for the heavier stuff that follows in April and May.
“I’m not panicking,” he told me. “I’m adjusting.” He moved one of his roving patrols from a Cordova route to cover Raines and Winchester during the 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. window. He said his clients haven’t asked for the change. He made the call himself because the numbers told him to.
That is what good security operators do. They read the data ahead of the client. They move resources before the phone rings.
The Danell Maxwell Factor
Another number circulating through Memphis law enforcement and private security circles: $32,500.
The U.S. Marshals Service and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation are jointly offering that reward for information leading to the capture of Danell Maxwell, 40, of Memphis. Maxwell allegedly shot a Memphis Police Department officer during a traffic stop on February 27. Attempted first-degree murder, aggravated assault, employment of a firearm during a dangerous felony. Three charges. No arrest.
He has not been found.
One incident among thousands. It barely moves the monthly crime averages. The ripple effect is something else entirely. When an officer gets shot during a routine stop, patrol behavior across the department shifts. Officers take fewer risks. Response times drift upward by seconds that matter. And when MPD pulls back even slightly, the gap either gets filled by contract security companies covering those same neighborhoods, or it stays open.
A security consultant who works with property management firms in Midtown told me he’s fielded three new inquiries since the Maxwell shooting. Not because crime is up in Midtown specifically. Because the shooting made the news and his clients read the news.
What the Task Force Can and Cannot Do
The task force has reduced crime. Full stop. Nobody serious disputes it. U.S. Marshals, ATF, DEA, local officers executing high-priority warrants together, week after week, for months. The arrest reports are public. Verifiable. Impressive by any standard.
What remains open, and what we have been tracking since Trump’s Memphis visit, is whether any of it lasts beyond the federal commitment. The task force was always designed to be temporary. The crime reduction it produces is real, but it is also, by definition, dependent on the task force being there. When you pull 400 federal agents and National Guard personnel out of a city, you find out very quickly what was suppression and what was structural change.
Crime climbing monthly while the task force is still in the field. That fact alone should be on the whiteboard of every security company owner in Shelby County. It suggests suppression is reaching its limits, or that Memphis’s seasonal pattern is strong enough to overpower 400 federal agents and a full National Guard presence, or some combination of the two that nobody at City Hall wants to discuss publicly.
The practical question for Q2 and Q3 staffing: do you plan around the year-over-year numbers, which look great, or the monthly trajectory, which doesn’t? One answer gets you a nice slide deck. The other keeps your clients covered when things get warm.
One More Number
Thirty-one homicides through late March. Compared to 43 at this point in 2025, that is a genuine improvement. Projected out, Memphis could end 2026 somewhere around 120 to 130 murders, which would be the lowest total since 2019 and a number that, five years ago, would have seemed impossible.
That projection only holds if the monthly escalation doesn’t accelerate through summer. And Memphis has a long, well-documented history of strong first quarters followed by summers that eat them alive. 2023 was the most recent example, a year where Q1 looked promising and August looked like a war zone.
The data says Memphis is safer than it was a year ago. The data also says it is getting less safe with each passing month. Both of those statements are true at the same time. The one you plan around depends on what business you’re in.
If you’re in the business of protecting people and property in Shelby County, plan for the trend. The comparison can take care of itself.