On October 17, about a dozen members of Free The 901 stood on the steps of City Hall and read names. Not the names of murder victims, which Memphis has heard too many times. These were names of residents who said they’d been stopped, searched, or questioned by National Guard troops and federal agents for doing nothing more than walking to a corner store or sitting in a parked car.
Seven weeks into Operation Safe Memphis, the city finds itself in a familiar and uncomfortable position: the numbers say one thing, the streets say something else.
What the Numbers Show
Memphis Police Department’s weekly crime trend report for the week ending November 15 showed Part 1 violent crimes down 19% compared to the same period last year. Property crimes dropped even further, falling 23%. Carjackings, the offense that triggered so much of the task force conversation in the first place, are down 31% year-over-year.
Those aren’t small movements. In a city that recorded 332 homicides in 2023, a sustained double-digit decline in violent crime is the kind of result that makes City Hall want to hold press conferences. And they have. Mayor Young referenced the numbers at a November 12 community meeting in Whitehaven, calling the task force “exactly what Memphis needed at exactly the right time.”
He’s not entirely wrong. The visible presence of National Guard Humvees at intersections along Elvis Presley Boulevard and Jackson Avenue has changed the feel of certain corridors. Residents in Frayser told me foot traffic at the Watkins Street convenience stores is quieter after dark. A property manager in Hickory Hill said she hadn’t received a single after-hours alarm call in three weeks, down from two or three per week before the task force arrived.
For Karen in Germantown reading this on her commute: if you manage commercial properties in high-crime corridors, the task force has almost certainly made your life easier in the short term. The question is what happens to that improvement when 400 Guard troops rotate out, and whether the methods producing these results can survive public scrutiny.
The ProPublica Report
On November 6, ProPublica published a 3,200-word investigation based on interviews with 14 Black residents in South Memphis and Orange Mound who described interactions with task force personnel. The accounts followed a pattern. A resident would be walking or driving in an area with Guard presence. A vehicle, sometimes marked and sometimes not, would pull alongside. The occupants would ask questions: Where are you going? Do you live around here? Can we see some ID?
None of the 14 people interviewed had been arrested or charged with anything. Several described being patted down. Two said their vehicles were searched without clear consent. One woman, a 58-year-old home health aide who lives on Ketchum Road, told ProPublica she’d been stopped three times in two weeks on her way to evening shifts.
The piece drew a distinction between Guard troops (who are operating under state authority and have limited law enforcement powers) and the federal agents from ATF, DEA, and U.S. Marshals who make up the task force’s investigative arm. Residents couldn’t always tell the difference. To a person walking home at 9 p.m. on Lamar Avenue, a uniform is a uniform.
That confusion matters more than it might seem, and it extends to private security as well.
The Private Security Problem Nobody’s Discussing
Here’s the angle I haven’t seen anyone else cover. Memphis has roughly 200 TDCI-licensed contract security companies operating in the metro area. Their guards are working the same streets, the same parking lots, the same commercial corridors where Guard troops and federal agents now patrol.
Before October, a security guard in a marked vehicle on Winchester Road was easy to identify. Residents knew the difference between a Phelps Security patrol car and an MPD cruiser. The visual cues were clear: different uniforms, different vehicles, different authority levels.
Now add 400 Guard troops in various configurations, federal agents in tactical gear, and ATF vehicles that look nothing like standard police cruisers. The visual environment around security and law enforcement has become genuinely confusing for residents. I’ve talked to three security company operators in the past two weeks, and all three raised the same concern: their guards are getting lumped in with the task force in residents’ minds.
One operator, who runs a 40-person team providing patrol services to apartment complexes along Shelby Drive, told me his guards have been confronted by residents who assumed they were part of the federal operation. “My guys are private employees doing a job,” he said. “They don’t have arrest powers. They can’t search anyone. They’re there to observe and report. Now residents see any uniform and they tense up.”
That’s a real operational problem. Private security depends on community cooperation. Guards need residents to wave them down when something looks wrong, to answer questions, to treat them as allies rather than threats. If the task force is eroding that trust as a side effect, private security companies are absorbing the damage.
The Civil Liberties Argument
The ACLU of Tennessee issued a statement on November 8, two days after the ProPublica piece, calling for “immediate oversight mechanisms” and an independent review of task force stops and searches. The statement cited the 2017-2020 MPD surveillance scandal, in which the department was found to have monitored activists, journalists, and elected officials without proper authorization, as evidence that Memphis law enforcement has a pattern of overreach when given expanded powers.
Free The 901, the grassroots organization that held the October 17 press conference, has been collecting incident reports through a Google Form shared on social media. As of November 18, they say they’ve received 87 submissions, though they haven’t made the raw data public. Their position is straightforward: “You can reduce crime without treating every Black person on the sidewalk like a suspect.”
It’s a hard argument to dismiss. Memphis is 64% Black. The task force operates primarily in neighborhoods that are 80-95% Black. Even if every stop is legally justified, the demographic reality means the burden falls almost entirely on one community.
That said, crime also falls disproportionately on that same community. The 332 homicides in 2023 didn’t happen in Germantown or Collierville. They happened in Whitehaven, Westwood, Frayser, North Memphis, and Orange Mound. The residents who benefit most from a 19% drop in violent crime are the same residents most likely to be stopped by the task force.
This tension doesn’t resolve neatly. Anyone telling you it does is selling something.
What Happens at Week 12?
The initial deployment authorization runs through early January. Governor Lee’s office has not commented on whether the Guard presence will be extended, reduced, or restructured. Memphis City Council member JB Smiley Jr. has called for a public hearing before any extension is approved.
The private security industry should be paying attention to this timeline. If the Guard withdraws in January without a clear transition plan, the demand for private security services in those same corridors will spike. Property managers and business owners who’ve grown accustomed to the visible deterrent of military vehicles won’t simply accept the vacuum.
Several security companies have already told me they’re fielding more RFP requests than usual for Q1 2026 coverage, specifically from clients in the task force’s operational zones. The smart operators are building proposals now rather than waiting for the withdrawal announcement.
There’s also a licensing question that nobody in the industry seems eager to raise publicly. If Guard troops are conducting what amounts to security patrols (observation, presence, deterrence) without TDCI licensure, does that create a regulatory precedent? Private security companies in Tennessee must carry a contract security company license under T.C.A. SS 62-35-101. The National Guard operates under entirely different authority. Yet the function, standing in a parking lot and watching for criminal activity, looks identical from the outside.
I asked TDCI for comment on whether the task force’s patrol activities could affect licensing enforcement standards for private companies. They declined to respond on the record.
Where This Leaves Memphis
Seven weeks is long enough to produce data and short enough to avoid reckoning with consequences. The crime numbers are real. The civil liberties complaints are also real. Both things occupy the same city at the same time, and pretending one cancels the other out is lazy thinking.
For security professionals in this market, the practical takeaway is simpler than the politics. The task force has changed the operating environment in Memphis, and that change will outlast the deployment itself. Residents’ expectations around visible security presence have shifted. Their tolerance for being questioned by anyone in a uniform has dropped. Private operators who don’t adjust their community engagement protocols to account for both shifts are going to lose contracts.
The Guard will leave. The trust damage, if it’s real, won’t leave with them.