Through the first three months of 2020, Memphis was having a surprisingly quiet year for violent crime. Aggravated assaults were down from the same period in 2019. Homicides were tracking slightly below last year’s pace. Some people at City Hall were cautiously optimistic that the downward trend from late 2019 might hold.
Then May hit, and everything changed.
Homicides in Memphis have spiked hard since the end of the stay-at-home order. The city recorded 190 murders in all of 2019. By early July 2020, we’re already past the halfway mark of that total with nearly six months still left on the calendar. If the current pace holds through December, Memphis could finish the year with its highest body count in decades.
This isn’t just a number. This is what happens when you combine a pandemic, mass unemployment, 95-degree heat, and a city that was already struggling with violence long before anyone heard of COVID-19.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Memphis Police Department reported 85 homicides through the end of May, compared to 69 over the same period in 2019. That’s a 23 percent jump in a city that was already one of the most violent in America. The numbers from June aren’t officially compiled yet, but local news reports and police blotter data suggest the pace stayed high or accelerated through the month.
MPD Deputy Chief Don Hines called it a “perfect storm” in a recent briefing. Economic stress from the pandemic. Social unrest following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Courts shut down for months, which meant people who would normally be locked up were still on the streets. Domestic violence calls surging as families stayed trapped in small apartments together. And a general sense of disorder that took hold when normal routines fell apart.
“Everything that keeps a lid on violence got removed at the same time,” Hines said.
Where It’s Happening
The violence isn’t evenly distributed across Memphis. It never is. The neighborhoods absorbing the worst of this summer’s spike are the same ones that have been absorbing it for years.
Frayser, in the northern part of the city along Thomas Street and Overton Crossing, has seen a string of shootings since late May. Two people were killed in separate incidents within four days during the last week of June. Community organizers in Frayser told me they’ve been trying to get more streetlights installed along North Hollywood for three years. Nothing’s changed.
Whitehaven, south of the airport along Elvis Presley Boulevard, has had its own cluster of shootings. A triple shooting at a convenience store on Shelby Drive in early June made the news for about twelve hours and then disappeared. The victims survived. Nobody was arrested as of press time.
Hickory Hill, the sprawling neighborhood along Winchester Road east of Mendenhall, has seen both property crime and violent crime rise since April. Car thefts have been a persistent problem in the parking lots around Hickory Ridge Mall, and several of those thefts turned violent when owners confronted the thieves.
Orange Mound, one of the oldest African American neighborhoods in the country (centered around Park Avenue and Lamar), saw at least four homicides between May and late June. Residents I talked to described a feeling of resignation. “We’ve been asking for help for years,” said one woman who lives on Saratoga Street. “COVID just made everyone forget about us even more.”
The COVID Connection
It’s tempting to blame the pandemic directly for the violence, and some of the connection is straightforward. Shelby County’s unemployment rate hit roughly 15 percent in April, up from around 4 percent at the start of the year. Thousands of service-industry workers across Memphis lost their income overnight when restaurants, hotels, and event venues shut down. The Peabody, the Guest House at Graceland, the convention center on South Main. All either closed or running skeleton crews.
When people can’t pay rent, can’t buy food, can’t see a path forward, some of them make desperate choices. That’s not excusing anything. It’s just what the data shows. Financial stress is one of the strongest predictors of both domestic violence and street crime, and Memphis has been under extreme financial stress since March.
The courts being closed also matters more than most people realize. Shelby County Criminal Court suspended jury trials in mid-March and hasn’t resumed them. That means cases are piling up, defendants out on bail are waiting longer for trial dates, and the whole system of accountability that normally operates (imperfectly, sure, but it operates) has been on pause for almost four months.
MPD officers have told me off the record that morale is low. They’re making arrests, but the courts aren’t moving cases forward. Suspects get bonded out and show up again within weeks. It creates a cycle that’s demoralizing for cops and dangerous for the neighborhoods where these people live.
The George Floyd Effect
You can’t write honestly about crime in Memphis this summer without talking about the protests. George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police on May 25. By May 28, protests had started in downtown Memphis. They were mostly peaceful during the day. Marches down Beale Street, rallies at the National Civil Rights Museum on Mulberry Street, signs and chanting outside City Hall.
The nights were different. On May 30, a protest on the I-40 bridge shut down traffic for hours. Scattered looting hit some businesses in the Poplar Corridor. Mayor Strickland imposed a curfew on June 1 that lasted until June 8. MPD Director Michael Rallings marched with protesters on June 3, trying to de-escalate tensions, and it worked to some degree. The curfew held, the protests stayed mostly peaceful after that first weekend, and Memphis avoided the kind of widespread destruction that hit Minneapolis, Portland, and other cities.
What the protests did do, though, was pull police resources away from regular patrol. During the curfew period, officers who would normally be working neighborhoods in Frayser or South Memphis were instead stationed downtown or along major corridors. The response time for routine calls slowed. And in a city where visible police presence is one of the few things that tamps down opportunistic crime, that absence was felt.
I want to be clear: I’m not blaming the protests for the crime spike. The data shows the uptick starting in May, before the first march happened. The underlying causes are economic and systemic. What the protests did was add another layer of strain to a police department that was already short-staffed and overstretched.
The Heat Factor
Memphis in July is miserable. Temperatures have been hitting 93 to 97 degrees most days, with humidity that makes it feel ten degrees worse. Criminologists have known for decades that violent crime peaks during heat waves. People are outside more. Tempers are shorter. Alcohol flows. Arguments that might end with a slammed door in February end with gunfire in July.
This year, the heat is compounded by the fact that many of the places people normally go to cool off are closed or restricted. Community centers are shut down. Public pools opened late and at reduced capacity. Libraries, which have always served as daytime refuges for people without air conditioning, only started reopening for limited services in late June.
So people sit on porches. They gather in parking lots. They hang out in parks after dark. And the shootings happen where the people are.
What MPD Is Doing
Director Rallings announced a summer crime initiative in mid-June that includes overtime patrols in high-crime areas, targeted warrant sweeps, and partnerships with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office for joint operations. The department has also been running what it calls “Blue CRUSH” operations (Crime Reduction Utilizing Statistical History) in specific zip codes identified through data analysis.
Whether any of this will be enough is an open question. MPD has around 2,000 sworn officers for a city of 650,000 people. That ratio is thin compared to similarly sized cities. The department has been struggling to recruit and retain officers for years, and COVID hasn’t helped. Officers have tested positive, been quarantined, and missed shifts throughout the spring.
The Shelby County District Attorney’s office, under Amy Weirich, has pushed for faster processing of violent felony cases, but without jury trials, the system can only do so much. Plea bargains keep some cases moving, but defendants charged with murder or aggravated assault rarely plead out quickly.
What Residents Are Saying
I spent part of the Fourth of July weekend driving through neighborhoods on the south and north sides of Memphis, talking to people who live in the middle of this. The word I heard more than any other was “tired.”
Tired of hearing gunshots at night. Tired of seeing police tape on their street. Tired of being scared to let their kids play outside. Tired of politicians promising change and delivering nothing.
A barber on Chelsea Avenue in North Memphis told me business has been slow since the pandemic started, and now his customers are afraid to come in after dark. “Used to be just Friday and Saturday nights you had to worry,” he said. “Now it’s any night.”
A woman working the register at a gas station on Brooks Road in Whitehaven said she’d seen three fights in the parking lot in the past week alone. “People are angry about everything,” she said. “No money, no jobs, this virus. And it comes out as violence.”
Looking at the Rest of the Summer
There’s no reason to expect things will calm down before September. The $600 federal unemployment supplement expires at the end of July, which will cut income for thousands of Memphis families. Eviction moratoriums are temporary. The school year is uncertain, which means parents who rely on schools for childcare are stuck. And COVID cases in Shelby County are still climbing, with over 12,000 confirmed as of early July, with daily counts regularly topping 300.
Memphis has been here before. The city recorded 181 homicides in 2017, then dropped to 160 in 2018, before climbing back to 190 in 2019. Each time, there’s a wave of attention, some task forces, some press conferences. Then it fades until the next spike.
What makes 2020 different is the sheer number of compounding factors. The pandemic. The recession. The social unrest. The court closures. The heat. None of these alone would produce the kind of spike we’re seeing. All of them together? That’s why Hines called it a perfect storm, and he’s right.
The rest of this summer is going to be bad. Anyone telling you otherwise isn’t paying attention.