Three weeks ago, a strip mall manager on Summer Avenue called MPD about a group breaking into cars in his parking lot at 2 in the afternoon. The dispatcher told him an officer would be there when one was available. He waited 47 minutes. By the time a patrol car rolled up, the lot was empty and two customers had driven away, rattled and unlikely to come back.
He’s not alone. Across Memphis, response times for non-emergency calls have stretched into territory that business owners say is unacceptable. And for the first time in recent memory, the answer many of them are landing on has nothing to do with City Hall.
They’re hiring their own security.
The Numbers Behind the Exodus
MPD’s authorized strength sits at roughly 2,300 officers. The actual number on the street in December 2020 is well below that. Director Michael Rallings has acknowledged the gap publicly, telling reporters this fall that the department was struggling to keep pace with retirements and resignations at the same time recruitment had gone cold.
The math is ugly. In a typical year before 2020, MPD might lose 60 to 80 officers through retirements. This year, that number has climbed past 120 and is still rising. Some of that is normal attrition in a large department. A lot of it isn’t.
Officers will tell you (off the record, always off the record) that the combination of a pandemic, civil unrest over the summer, and a city on pace to break its all-time homicide record has drained morale to a point where early retirement looks less like quitting and more like self-preservation. Younger officers, the ones with five to eight years on the force, are leaving for suburban departments in Bartlett and Collierville where the pay is comparable and the caseload is a fraction of what Memphis throws at them.
Recruitment hasn’t kept up. MPD’s academy classes have gotten smaller. COVID restrictions complicated the training pipeline for months. The national conversation around policing hasn’t exactly been a recruiting tool, either.
Rallings, to his credit, hasn’t pretended the problem doesn’t exist. “We need more officers,” he said during a City Council budget hearing earlier this year. “I don’t think anyone in this room disagrees with that.”
The disagreement is over what to do while the city waits for those officers to materialize.
What Businesses Are Actually Doing
Walk down Poplar Avenue from East Memphis toward Midtown and count the private security vehicles. Five years ago, you might have spotted one or two in the big shopping center lots near Laurelwood. Today, they’re parked outside office complexes, medical clinics, restaurants, and retail storefronts that never had a guard on-site before.
The same shift is happening on Union Avenue downtown, where a cluster of law offices and small businesses pooled money last summer to hire an armed guard for their shared parking garage. It’s happening on Summer Avenue, where the auto dealers and used car lots between White Station and Perkins have started contracting overnight patrol services to cut down on a theft problem that’s gotten out of hand.
Tony DeSoto manages a commercial real estate portfolio of six properties in the Summer Avenue corridor. He told me in November that he started getting calls from tenants about break-ins and vandalism in the spring, right around the time COVID shut everything down and foot traffic disappeared. He called MPD. He called his city council representative. He called his insurance company. Then he called a security firm.
“I ran the numbers,” DeSoto said. “I was losing more per month in vandalism repairs and tenant complaints than it would cost me to put a guard on-site three nights a week.”
He’s paying $15 an hour for an unarmed guard, 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., Thursday through Saturday. That’s roughly $1,440 a month. His vandalism costs had been running $2,000 to $3,500 a month before the guard started.
“It’s not even close,” he said. “I should have done this two years ago.”
The Economics Are Hard to Argue With
DeSoto’s math isn’t unusual. Across the city, property managers and business owners are running the same calculation: what does it cost me to NOT have security?
For a mid-size retail location, the answer often lands between $2,000 and $5,000 a month in losses from theft, property damage, liability exposure, and the harder-to-measure cost of customers who stop showing up because they don’t feel safe. An unarmed guard at $13 to $16 an hour, working a single shift five nights a week, costs between $2,800 and $3,500 a month.
Armed guards run higher, typically $18 to $25 an hour in the Memphis market, and the insurance requirements push that cost up further. Still, for businesses dealing with repeated break-ins or employee safety concerns in parking lots, the premium often makes sense.
The real driver, though, isn’t just the dollar amount. It’s the speed. A private guard on your property responds in seconds. An MPD officer responding to a Priority 3 call might take 30 minutes or more, depending on what else is happening across the precinct that night.
And in Memphis in December 2020, a lot is happening.
A City Under Pressure
Memphis is on pace to finish the year with more than 310 homicides. If the current trend holds through the end of the month, it will break the city’s all-time record. Violent crime, property crime, auto theft: the numbers are all moving in the wrong direction.
That’s not MPD’s fault alone. The pandemic threw gasoline on problems that were already smoldering: unemployment, shuttered businesses, strained social services, a court system backed up for months. Officers are being pulled into more calls with fewer colleagues available to back them up.
The effect trickles down. When patrol units are stretched thin answering violent crime calls in Frayser and Whitehaven, the response time for a shoplifting report at a Poplar Avenue pharmacy gets longer. When it gets long enough, the pharmacy stops calling. And when the pharmacy stops calling, it starts calling a security company instead.
That’s the cycle playing out across Memphis right now.
Who’s Benefiting
Private security companies in the Memphis area are having their best year in recent memory, and they’ll tell you that with a mix of professional satisfaction and genuine exhaustion.
Local firms have picked up contracts they never would have gotten in a normal year. Property managers who relied entirely on MPD patrol presence are now budgeting for private guards. Retail chains that only posted security during the holiday season are keeping guards on-site year-round. Construction sites along the medical district and the university area, always targets for copper theft, are hiring overnight watch services at rates that would have seemed steep two years ago and now look like bargains.
The national companies have noticed, too. Allied Universal and Securitas both have Memphis offices, and both have been expanding their local guard workforce to meet demand. The hiring challenge cuts both ways, though: the same labor market pressures that make it hard for MPD to fill academy classes make it hard for security firms to find qualified guards.
Starting wages for unarmed security positions in Memphis have crept from $10 to $11 an hour two years ago to $13 to $15 today. Armed positions that used to start at $14 are now posting at $17 to $20. Companies that can’t match those rates are losing guards to competitors who can.
The Uncomfortable Question
None of this is how it’s supposed to work. Private security was always meant to supplement public policing, not substitute for it. A guard at a strip mall can deter theft and call 911 when something goes wrong, and that’s a good thing. What a guard can’t do is investigate crimes, make arrests with full legal authority, or address the root causes of why a neighborhood’s crime rate is climbing.
When businesses start viewing private security as their primary line of defense because the police department can’t get there fast enough, something fundamental has shifted. It’s a shift that benefits security companies and protects individual properties, and that’s fine as far as it goes. It doesn’t go far enough.
Director Rallings knows this. The City Council knows this. The business owners writing checks to security firms every month know it too.
The staffing crisis at MPD didn’t start in 2020, and it won’t end when the calendar turns to 2021. The pandemic and the spike in violent crime accelerated a trend that was already underway: fewer officers, more demand, longer waits, and a growing number of Memphis businesses deciding they can’t afford to wait.
The check they’re writing to a security company isn’t really paying for a guard. It’s paying for a response time that the city can’t deliver right now.
Whether that’s a temporary fix or the new normal depends on decisions that haven’t been made yet. For the businesses on Poplar, Summer, and Union, the decision they’ve already made is pretty clear: they’re not waiting to find out.