The numbers from the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission landed on my desk last week, and they confirm what a lot of people in this city already feel in their gut. Violent crime across Memphis city limits jumped 9.7% during April, May, and the first three weeks of June compared to the same stretch in 2019. Countywide, the increase was 9.1%.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s a real, measurable spike in the number of people getting hurt.
The easy explanation is COVID. The pandemic disrupted everything, and crime is part of everything. There’s truth in that. People lost jobs. Stress went through the roof. Normal social structures broke down. All of that feeds into violence.
It’s also incomplete. The numbers tell a more complicated story, and if Memphis is going to deal with what’s happening, the city needs to understand more than just the headline.
Q1 Was Actually Getting Better
This is the part most people don’t know. Before COVID hit Memphis hard in mid-March, violent crime was trending downward. January and February 2020 showed modest decreases compared to the same months in 2019. The Memphis Police Department had been running targeted patrols in high-crime areas. Director Michael Rallings talked publicly about data-driven policing strategies. And for a couple months, the data backed him up.
Then March happened. Social distancing orders. Business closures. The economy cratering almost overnight. By mid-April, the Q1 gains were gone.
Whatever momentum Memphis had built through the first ten weeks of the year evaporated in about three weeks. That’s how fast things shifted.
The Homicide Numbers
I don’t like writing about homicides as statistics because every number is a person. Still, the data matters.
Memphis homicides have been accelerating since April. The pace through mid-June puts the city on track to hit 120 or more deaths by the end of July. For context, all of 2019 saw 190 homicides. We’re already well past the halfway mark for that total, and we’re not even through the first half of the year.
Director Rallings has acknowledged the trend publicly. He’s pointed to several contributing factors, and from what I can tell, his analysis is honest even if the situation is grim. The department is stretched thin.
Homicides are concentrating in neighborhoods that have struggled with violence for years. South Memphis. Orange Mound. Frayser. North Memphis near the Smokey City area. The pandemic didn’t create violent crime in these neighborhoods. It made existing conditions worse.
Why It’s Happening: The Economics
Start with money. Or the lack of it.
Shelby County’s unemployment rate exploded in April. Tens of thousands of people lost work when restaurants, hotels, retail stores, and entertainment venues shut down. The FedEx hub kept running, and healthcare kept hiring, but those jobs don’t absorb an entire displaced workforce.
Memphis was already a city where a lot of people lived close to the edge financially. Median household income sits well below the national average. When you take away someone’s paycheck and their savings amount to maybe a week’s worth of groceries, desperation sets in fast.
I’m not making excuses for anyone who commits a violent crime. I am saying that when you add financial desperation to existing tensions (personal disputes, neighborhood conflicts, drug territory), the result is predictable. People with nothing to lose behave differently than people with something to protect.
The federal stimulus checks helped some. Tennessee’s unemployment system, which crashed repeatedly in April, left a lot of people waiting weeks for benefits. For some families, those weeks without income were the difference between keeping it together and falling apart.
The Courts Shut Down
This one doesn’t get enough attention. When Shelby County courts suspended normal operations in March, the criminal justice system essentially hit pause. Arraignments slowed. Trials stopped. The jail reduced its population by releasing lower-level offenders to reduce COVID transmission risk.
On paper, those releases focused on nonviolent offenders: people held on misdemeanors, technical violations, and minor charges. In practice, “nonviolent” is a legal category, not a behavioral prediction. Some of the people released went home and stayed out of trouble. Some didn’t.
More significant than the releases was the signal that the system had stepped back. If you’re someone weighing whether to carry a gun illegally or settle a dispute with violence, the knowledge that courts aren’t functioning normally and police are occupied elsewhere changes your calculation. I don’t think most criminals sit down and do a formal risk assessment. I do think the general sense that consequences are delayed or absent affects behavior on the street.
Criminal court operations won’t return to anything like normal capacity for months. The backlog of cases is already enormous and growing every week.
Police Resources Got Pulled in Three Directions
Memphis PD had to deal with three simultaneous demands that would strain any department.
First, COVID enforcement. Officers were assigned to check businesses for compliance with health directives, respond to complaints about gatherings, and support testing and screening operations. Those assignments pulled people off regular patrol.
Second, the protests following George Floyd’s death brought officers downtown and to other areas for crowd management and security operations. Whatever your position on those protests, they required police presence, and that presence came from somewhere. Shifts that would have gone to patrol duty in Hickory Hill or Whitehaven instead went to managing demonstrations on Beale Street and around City Hall.
Third, regular crime didn’t stop. People still called 911 for domestic disputes, robberies, assaults, and everything else. The calls kept coming while the department had fewer available officers to respond.
Something had to give. Response times stretched. Proactive patrols, the kind of visible police presence that deters opportunistic crime, decreased in several precincts. Community policing programs that depend on face-to-face interaction with residents went dormant because of social distancing requirements.
Director Rallings can’t manufacture officers out of thin air. The department was already dealing with recruitment and retention challenges before COVID. The pandemic just made a tight situation tighter.
Property Crime Flipped
Here’s something interesting in the data. Property crime patterns shifted in ways that make sense once you think about them.
Commercial burglaries in traditionally busy areas (Midtown, East Memphis shopping corridors, the Medical District) went down. Why? Because people were home. Residential neighborhoods had more eyes on the street during the day than they normally would. A burglar trying to break into a house on a Tuesday afternoon in Cooper-Young had a much higher chance of being seen by a neighbor working from home than in a normal year.
The flip side: commercial areas got hit harder. Empty restaurants on Overton Square. Closed shops on South Main. Shuttered businesses along Lamar. When a building sits empty for weeks and everyone knows nobody is inside, it becomes a target. Some business owners came back to find copper stripped from their HVAC systems, equipment stolen, and windows broken.
The empty office buildings downtown were a particular concern. Several property managers told me they hired security specifically because their buildings were sitting vacant and they’d already had incidents. Insurance companies were asking what security measures were in place. Without guards on site, some policies wouldn’t cover theft or vandalism claims.
Domestic Violence: The Hidden Number
Domestic violence calls to Memphis police increased this spring. The exact percentages are harder to pin down because reporting rates for domestic violence are always unreliable because many incidents never generate a police call at all.
What we know: shelters reported higher demand. The Memphis Area Women’s Council saw increased calls to their hotline. Advocates told me they were hearing from people trapped in dangerous home situations with no easy way to leave because of financial constraints and limited shelter capacity during COVID.
Quarantine forced people to stay home with their abusers for weeks on end. Alcohol sales went up. Stress was everywhere. The recipe for domestic violence couldn’t have been more perfectly mixed.
This is the part of the crime data that worries me most, because it’s the least visible and the hardest to address through traditional policing. A patrol car driving through Raleigh doesn’t prevent what’s happening behind a closed front door.
Carjackings: Specific Neighborhoods, Specific Pattern
Carjackings deserve their own mention because they’ve been hitting specific areas hard. Whitehaven, Raleigh, and Hickory Hill have all seen clusters of carjacking incidents through the spring.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who’s covered Memphis crime for a while. Young suspects, often juveniles. Targeting people at gas stations, parking lots, and drive-throughs. Armed in many cases. Quick and aggressive.
What’s different this year is the frequency. The pace of carjackings through May and June exceeded the same period last year by a margin that’s hard to ignore. Whether that’s related to the court shutdowns, the reduced police visibility, or something else entirely, I can’t say with certainty. Probably a mix of all of it.
Residents in these neighborhoods are angry. I talked to a woman at a gas station on Winchester Road in Hickory Hill who told me she won’t stop for gas after dark anymore. She drives to Germantown instead. “I shouldn’t have to leave my own neighborhood to feel safe getting gas,” she said. She’s right. She shouldn’t.
The Summer Factor
Memphis gets hotter and more violent every summer. That’s not an opinion. It’s a pattern that shows up in the crime data year after year. June, July, and August are consistently the highest-crime months. People are outside more. Tempers are shorter. Daylight lasts longer, and so do the opportunities for conflict.
We’re entering that stretch now with a population that’s more stressed, more financially strained, and more heavily armed than in a typical year. Gun sales across Tennessee broke records in March and April. Many of those purchases were first-time buyers who have no training and no experience managing a firearm under pressure.
I don’t say this to scare anyone. I say it because the data suggests the 9.7% increase we’ve seen so far could get worse before it gets better. If July and August follow historical patterns and stack on top of the existing COVID-driven spike, Memphis is looking at one of its most violent summers in recent memory.
What This Means for the Security Industry
Every percentage point increase in violent crime translates to increased demand for private security. Business owners, property managers, and neighborhood associations are all spending more on guards, patrols, and surveillance than they were at this time last year.
That’s happening while the security industry faces its own COVID challenges: licensing delays, training bottlenecks, staffing shortages. The demand curve is going up. The supply curve isn’t keeping pace.
For Memphis residents, the practical advice hasn’t changed: be aware of your surroundings, lock your car, don’t leave anything worth stealing visible, and report suspicious activity. These are the same things we’ve been saying for years. They still work.
For the city’s leadership, the Q2 numbers should be a warning. The pandemic created conditions that feed violence, and those conditions aren’t going away soon. Courts are still backlogged. Jobs haven’t come back. The summer is just getting started.
I’ll keep tracking the data as it comes in. The Crime Commission releases updated numbers regularly, and I’ll report them here as they land. If the trend line changes, in either direction, you’ll hear about it.