By the first week of November, the City of Memphis had already recorded more than 170 homicides for 2019. That number, while grim on its own, told only part of the story. Aggravated assaults, carjackings, and property crimes had climbed steadily since spring, and residents in several neighborhoods were feeling the pressure more than most.
The Memphis Police Department released its third-quarter crime data in October, confirming what many people who live east of Getwell Road and south of Shelby Drive already knew. Violent crime was up in clusters, concentrated in the same ZIP codes year after year. The 38118 corridor running through Oakhaven and Parkway Village posted some of the highest incident counts in the city. Hickory Hill, covered by the 38115 ZIP code, wasn’t far behind. And Whitehaven, stretching across 38116, rounded out the top three.
A Year on Track for 190-Plus Homicides
Memphis recorded 184 homicides in 2018. That was a slight uptick from the 180 logged in 2017. By early November 2019, the trajectory pointed somewhere north of 185, possibly clearing 190 before New Year’s Eve. The final tally wouldn’t arrive until January, yet the direction was obvious.
What made this year’s count especially frustrating for community leaders was the age of many victims. Several fatal shootings between August and October involved people under 25. A few involved teenagers. Operation Community Shield, an MPD initiative launched in the summer to target gang-related violence in Frayser and North Memphis, had produced dozens of arrests. Still, the homicide rate kept climbing in other parts of the city while law enforcement focused resources on those corridors.
Director Michael Rallings addressed reporters in late October, acknowledging the numbers while pointing to what he called “pockets of progress.” Aggravated assaults in the Downtown and Midtown precincts had dropped compared to the same period in 2018. Rallings credited increased foot patrols along Beale Street and the Main Street corridor, along with surveillance camera upgrades funded through a city council allocation earlier in the year.
“We can’t arrest our way out of this,” Rallings said during the press conference. “We need the community working with us.”
Carjackings: A Growing Concern Across the City
Carjackings had been a persistent problem in Memphis for years, and 2019 was no exception. What changed was the geography. Incidents that had traditionally concentrated around South Memphis and Orange Mound began popping up in areas that residents considered relatively safe.
The Sea Isle neighborhood near the University of Memphis saw multiple carjacking attempts between September and November. In one case, a woman was approached at gunpoint in the parking area of a condominium complex off Sea Isle Road. She refused to hand over the car, managed to put distance between herself and the attacker, and watched from behind another vehicle as the suspect drove off in her car. Her neighbor, already on the phone when the confrontation started, had called police.
Property managers at several apartment complexes in the area responded by adding cameras, improving lighting, and encouraging residents to report suspicious activity. The Monarch Condominiums installed new gate controls and began hosting monthly safety meetings for owners.
Cordova and Bartlett, suburbs that border Memphis to the northeast, also reported carjacking attempts near shopping centers along Stage Road. The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office confirmed it was coordinating with MPD on cases that crossed jurisdictional lines, particularly along the Germantown Parkway corridor where retail parking lots provided easy targets.
Hickory Hill: Crime and Community Response
Hickory Hill has carried a heavy reputation for at least a decade. The neighborhood, centered around the intersection of Hickory Hill Road and Winchester, changed dramatically between the early 2000s and 2019. Strip malls that once anchored the area lost tenants. Apartment complexes cycled through management companies. The population shifted, and so did the crime statistics.
In 2019, the 38115 ZIP code regularly ranked among the top three in the city for reported crimes. Auto theft was particularly common. Residents who parked on the street or in open lots knew the risk. Kia and Hyundai models, which had gained national attention for a manufacturing defect that made them easy to steal, showed up frequently in theft reports from the area.
The Hickory Hill Community Collaborative, a group that had organized neighborhood cleanups and town halls for several years, pushed MPD to increase patrol visibility along Winchester Road and Knight Arnold. The group’s leadership met with city council members in September to request better streetlighting near the Hickory Ridge Mall site, where the abandoned shopping center had become a magnet for illegal dumping and occasional criminal activity.
Some improvements did materialize. MPD’s Ridgeway Station, which covers much of Hickory Hill, reported a slight decrease in burglaries between July and September compared to the same period in 2018. Officers attributed the change to a targeted patrol strategy that focused on known break-in routes behind apartment complexes along Ridgeway Road.
Still, the overall picture remained difficult. Aggravated assaults in the area were up 8% through September, according to precinct-level data shared during a community meeting.
Whitehaven: Property Crime and the Holiday Season
Whitehaven’s relationship with crime was complicated. The neighborhood, anchored by Elvis Presley Boulevard and the Graceland tourism district, contained pockets of stability alongside stretches where vacant homes and neglected lots attracted trouble.
Property crime in the 38116 ZIP code tracked above the city average throughout 2019. Larceny from vehicles topped the list, followed by residential burglaries. The Shelby County District Attorney’s office prosecuted several organized retail theft rings during the year that had operated out of Whitehaven and the adjacent Westwood area, hitting stores along Elvis Presley Boulevard and Brooks Road.
As November arrived, residents and business owners braced for the holiday season. Retailers along Elvis Presley Boulevard and at Southland Mall had learned to expect a spike in shoplifting and parking lot theft between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Mall security at Southland had increased its guard count in previous years during this period, and 2019 was shaping up to be no different.
MPD’s Airways Station, which covers Whitehaven, launched a holiday safety initiative in late October. The program paired uniformed officers with plainclothes detectives at major retail locations during peak shopping hours. A similar effort at the same time in 2018 had resulted in more than 30 arrests for shoplifting and vehicle break-ins between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.
MPD Operations and Resource Challenges
The Memphis Police Department entered the fall of 2019 facing a staffing problem that had been building for years. Authorized strength called for roughly 2,400 officers. Actual headcount hovered closer to 2,000, depending on how you counted officers in training, on leave, or assigned to administrative roles.
Recruitment was an ongoing struggle. Starting pay for MPD officers in 2019 sat around $37,000, which placed Memphis below several comparable cities in the Southeast. Nashville, by comparison, offered starting salaries north of $45,000. The pay gap made it hard to attract candidates and even harder to keep experienced officers from leaving for better-paying departments or private security work.
Director Rallings had lobbied the city council for a pay increase throughout 2019. The council approved a modest raise effective in the new fiscal year, yet the bump wasn’t large enough to close the gap with Nashville or even with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, which paid its deputies more than MPD paid its patrol officers.
The staffing shortage had real consequences on the street. Response times for non-emergency calls stretched longer. Community policing programs, which depended on officers spending time in neighborhoods rather than racing between 911 calls, operated on a skeleton crew. The Blue CRUSH (Crime Reduction Utilizing Statistical History) program, which used data analysis to deploy officers to high-crime areas, continued running. Its effectiveness, though, depended on having enough officers to send where the data pointed.
What the Numbers Mean for Memphis Residents
Raw crime statistics are useful for identifying trends, and they’re terrible at capturing what it actually feels like to live in a neighborhood where those trends play out. A 5% increase in aggravated assaults across a precinct doesn’t describe the woman on Sea Isle Road who had to hide behind a car while someone stole hers. It doesn’t capture the frustration of a Hickory Hill shop owner who’s installed cameras, hired a guard, and still gets his windows smashed.
The numbers heading into the holidays pointed toward a year that would end somewhere around 190 homicides. That placed 2019 in the upper range of recent years, close to the 188 recorded in 2016. It wasn’t the worst year Memphis had seen (the city logged 228 homicides in 2016, if you count the full Shelby County figure), yet it wasn’t getting better either.
For residents in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, the conversation had moved past statistics. They wanted tangible changes: more patrol cars on their blocks, faster response when they called 911, and city investment in the vacant lots and abandoned buildings that attracted crime. Some of those changes required money the city didn’t have. Others required political will.
The holiday season would bring more shoppers, more crowded parking lots, and more opportunities for property crime. Memphis had been through this cycle before. The question heading into November was whether the city had learned anything from previous years, or whether it would repeat the same patterns and hope for better numbers in January.
Community groups across the city were planning holiday safety workshops throughout November. The Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, a nonprofit that tracked crime data and advocated for evidence-based policing strategies, had released its quarterly report in October and would publish updated numbers after the new year. For now, the numbers told a story that most Memphis residents already understood: the city had work to do, and two months of holiday chaos were about to make that work harder.