Three restaurants on Cooper Street in the Cooper-Young district got broken into during the same week in August. All three were closed for dine-in service. All three had their back doors kicked in. One lost a safe with about $2,000 in cash. Another lost kitchen equipment. The third lost nothing of real value, though the owner spent $800 replacing the door.
Property crime in Memphis didn’t go away when the pandemic hit. It moved. The patterns that MPD officers and security professionals tracked for years got scrambled starting in March, and six months later, the new patterns are becoming clear enough to describe.
Commercial burglaries are up. Auto theft is up everywhere. Catalytic converter theft has gone from a nuisance to a trend. Residential burglary, strangely, may actually be down. And carjacking is ticking upward in a way that has MPD paying close attention.
Empty Buildings, Open Invitations
The math on commercial burglary during COVID is straightforward. When a restaurant on Madison Avenue is closed four days a week instead of one, that’s three extra nights with nobody inside. When an office building in the Crosstown area goes from 500 workers a day to 40, the cleaning crew leaves earlier and the building sits dark by 7 p.m. When a retail strip on Summer Avenue has three out of eight storefronts shuttered permanently, foot traffic drops and the remaining businesses lose the natural surveillance that comes from having neighbors.
Memphis was already a city with a serious property crime problem before COVID. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report has consistently ranked the metro area among the highest in the nation for property offenses. What the pandemic did was concentrate the risk. Businesses that were already marginal became easy targets. Commercial districts that depended on restaurant and retail traffic lost the human presence that kept opportunistic criminals at bay.
Midtown has been hit particularly hard. The neighborhood’s mix of older commercial buildings, small restaurants, and independent shops creates exactly the kind of target environment that burglars prefer: properties with limited security systems, aging doors and windows, and owners who can’t afford overnight guard coverage. The Overton Square area, Cooper-Young, and the blocks along Poplar between Cleveland and East Parkway have all seen upticks in break-in reports this summer.
Cars Are Disappearing
Auto theft numbers in Memphis have been climbing for years. COVID accelerated the trend in ways that caught some people off guard.
The curbside pickup boom is part of it. Restaurants and retailers that pivoted to curbside service asked customers to pull up and leave their cars running while staff brought out orders. At some locations, customers would park, walk inside to pick up food, and leave their cars unlocked for two or three minutes. That’s more than enough time.
The rise of delivery services created another opening. Delivery drivers for DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub routinely leave vehicles running while they run into restaurants. A driver in the Whitehaven area told me he’d had his car stolen in July while picking up an order at a chicken restaurant on Elvis Presley Boulevard. He was inside for less than ninety seconds.
MPD has been warning about this for months. The department’s public communications have repeatedly emphasized the basics: lock your car, take your keys, don’t leave it running unattended. The message isn’t new. The circumstances that make people ignore it are.
Parking lots at grocery stores, pharmacies, and big-box retailers along Germantown Parkway and in the Wolfchase area have become hot spots. The common thread is predictability. Criminals know that at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday, the Kroger parking lot on Poplar will have dozens of people walking in and out, many of them distracted, some of them leaving purses on seats or keys in the ignition.
The Catalytic Converter Problem
This one is newer, and it’s not just a Memphis story. Catalytic converter theft has been rising across the country since late 2019, and the pandemic pushed it into overdrive.
The economics are simple. Catalytic converters contain platinum, palladium, and rhodium. The price of rhodium has more than doubled in the past year, hitting record levels. A thief with a battery-powered reciprocating saw can remove a catalytic converter in under two minutes. A stolen converter from a Toyota Prius or a Honda CR-V can fetch $200 to $500 from a scrap metal dealer willing to look the other way.
The National Insurance Crime Bureau started tracking the spike in early 2020 and the numbers have climbed every month since. Memphis has seen its share. Apartment complexes and church parking lots are common targets because vehicles sit in the same spot for hours or overnight. An apartment complex manager near the University of Memphis told me they’d had six converters stolen in a single night in late August.
For property owners and security companies, this crime is tricky to prevent. It happens fast, often in the early morning hours, and the thief needs nothing more than a saw and a floor jack. Camera systems help with identification after the fact, and well-lit parking areas can act as a deterrent. Mobile patrol services that make unpredictable rounds are probably the most effective countermeasure, though they add cost.
The Residential Surprise
One category of property crime appears to be trending down, and the reason is obvious: people are home.
When millions of Americans started working from home in March, residential burglary lost its primary enabling condition. Most residential break-ins happen during the day, when homeowners are at work and houses sit empty. With stay-at-home orders and widespread remote work, that window closed.
Memphis neighborhoods that historically saw high rates of daytime residential burglary, places like Raleigh, Hickory Hill, and parts of Frayser, may be seeing some relief. The data is incomplete because MPD’s crime reporting has its own pandemic-related delays, and not every break-in gets reported. Still, the national trend is consistent: residential burglary dropped in most major cities during the first half of 2020.
The question is whether this holds. As offices reopen and more workers return to commuting, the empty-house window reopens. And some of the economic pressure that drives property crime (unemployment, financial desperation, substance abuse) has only gotten worse since March.
Carjacking Is the One to Watch
Auto theft gets the attention, and the numbers are bigger. Carjacking is a smaller category numerically, but it’s violent, and the trend in Memphis is going the wrong direction.
Carjacking is a robbery, not a property crime. Someone takes your car by force or threat of force. In Memphis, it often involves a gun. It happens at gas stations, in driveways, at stop signs. The victims range from college students to elderly residents.
MPD reported 287 carjackings in Memphis in 2020 through September, and the pace has picked up since the summer. The incidents tend to cluster in certain areas: the Parkway Village and Hickory Hill neighborhoods, parts of Orange Mound and Whitehaven, and increasingly in Midtown.
What makes carjacking different from a stolen car is the trauma. A car can be replaced. The experience of having a weapon pointed at you while someone takes your keys doesn’t go away quickly. Security consultants working with commercial properties are starting to factor carjacking risk into their site assessments, particularly for businesses with parking lots that lack good lighting and camera coverage.
What This Means for Security
COVID didn’t create Memphis’s property crime problems. The city has been fighting these numbers for decades. What the pandemic did is shift where the crimes happen, when they happen, and who the victims are.
For businesses that are currently closed or operating at reduced capacity, the immediate question is whether you have adequate security for an empty or near-empty building. An alarm system is necessary, and it’s not sufficient. Camera systems with remote monitoring capability give you evidence after a break-in. Regular patrol visits from a licensed security company give you a chance of preventing one.
For property managers with parking facilities, the auto theft and catalytic converter trends mean lighting, cameras, and unpredictable patrol schedules are worth the investment. And for everyone in Memphis, the old advice still applies: lock your doors, take your keys, and stay aware of your surroundings.
The virus changed a lot of things in this city. Property crime just rearranged itself to fit the new reality.