“In just the first several months, SCORPION officers have made 566 arrests, 390 of them for felonies,” Mayor Jim Strickland told the crowd at his January 2022 State of the City address. He rattled off more numbers: 253 weapons seized, 270 vehicles recovered, $103,000 in cash confiscated. The audience applauded.
The speech was vintage Strickland. Focused on public safety. Heavy on police investment. Light on the private sector. He pitched the SCORPION unit (Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods) as a centerpiece of his anti-crime strategy, alongside a gun violence intervention program and additional police funding. For a mayor in his final term, limited by term limits and facing a city that recorded 346 homicides in 2021, the message was clear: we’re throwing everything we have at this.
What Strickland didn’t talk about was where private security fits in the picture. That silence says a lot.
The Police Staffing Problem Nobody Wants to Quantify
Memphis has a police shortage that predates COVID and has only gotten worse since. MPD’s sworn officer count has been falling for years. The department had roughly 2,449 officers at its peak in 2011. By early 2022, that number had dropped below 2,100. Some estimates put it closer to 2,000.
For a city of roughly 650,000 people, that works out to about 3.2 officers per 1,000 residents. The national average for cities Memphis’s size is closer to 3.5 to 4.0. The gap might sound small in the abstract. On the streets of Whitehaven or Raleigh at midnight, it’s the difference between a patrol car that shows up in eight minutes and one that shows up in twenty-five.
Strickland’s speech acknowledged the challenge indirectly. The SCORPION unit itself is a response to the reality that normal patrol operations can’t cover everything. A specialized unit that targets high-crime areas with concentrated enforcement is, in part, an admission that the regular force is stretched too thin to do the job on its own.
The gun violence intervention program, another centerpiece of the speech, relies on community outreach workers rather than officers. That’s smart policy. It’s also a recognition that MPD doesn’t have enough cops to put one on every corner.
Businesses Already Made Their Choice
While the mayor was celebrating SCORPION’s early results, Memphis businesses were making their own calculations. And many of them had already decided that waiting for MPD wasn’t an option.
Walk down Union Avenue in Midtown on any weekday evening and count the private security vehicles. Drive through the shopping centers along Poplar in East Memphis. Check the construction sites in the medical district near Methodist University Hospital. Private security is everywhere, and the companies providing it are busier than they’ve been in years.
The math makes sense from a business owner’s perspective. MPD’s average response time for non-emergency calls stretches well beyond what most commercial properties consider acceptable. A private guard on site can respond to a trespasser, a shoplifter, or a disturbance in minutes. Calling 911 and waiting for a patrol car is a different experience entirely, especially for Priority 3 and Priority 4 calls that MPD has to triage behind more serious incidents.
“We stopped relying on police response about three years ago,” one Germantown-area shopping center manager told me. “We have two guards on site during operating hours. It’s not cheap. It’s cheaper than losing tenants because their customers don’t feel safe.”
The Gap Between Public and Private
The relationship between public policing and private security in Memphis has always been complicated. In theory, they’re complementary. Police handle criminal enforcement. Private security handles prevention, access control, and property protection. In practice, the line is blurry and getting blurrier.
Private security guards in Tennessee have no arrest powers beyond what any private citizen has under state law. They can detain someone caught committing a felony until police arrive. They can ask someone to leave private property. They can observe and report. What they can’t do is conduct criminal investigations, execute search warrants, or use force in the same way a sworn officer can.
That legal framework is important because it defines what businesses are actually buying when they hire a security company. They’re buying presence. A visible guard at a property entrance deters casual crime. They’re buying response, someone who’s already there when something happens. And they’re buying documentation, detailed incident reports that support insurance claims and legal proceedings.
What they’re not buying is law enforcement. And that distinction matters when a city’s crime strategy leans as heavily on policing as Strickland’s does.
SCORPION’s Early Track Record
The SCORPION unit launched in late 2021 as a plainclothes, aggressive enforcement unit focused on violent crime hotspots. Strickland’s numbers from the State of the City were impressive on the surface. In just a few months of operation, 566 arrests is significant volume. The 390 felony arrests suggest the unit was going after serious offenders, not racking up numbers on minor charges.
The 253 weapons seized is the figure that matters most in a city where gun violence is the primary driver of homicide numbers. Memphis recorded 346 homicides in 2021, the highest in the city’s history at that point. Getting guns off the street is the most direct intervention available.
Still, some questions hover over the unit’s approach. Aggressive, plainclothes policing has a mixed history in American cities. The same tactics that produce high arrest numbers can also produce excessive force complaints and community trust problems. New York’s Street Crime Unit, which the NYPD dissolved in 2002, followed a similar model. So did specialized units in Chicago, Atlanta, and Louisville that drew scrutiny over use-of-force incidents.
Memphis hasn’t had those problems with SCORPION yet. The unit is new, and its early results look strong on paper. Whether the approach can sustain itself without generating the kind of incidents that have sunk similar units in other cities is a question that won’t have an answer for months or years.
What the Private Sector Needs From City Hall
If you run a security company in Memphis or manage security contracts for commercial properties, Strickland’s speech probably left you with mixed feelings. More police funding and focused enforcement units are good for the city. A safer Memphis is better for everyone, including the private security industry.
At the same time, the speech didn’t address several things that directly affect private security operations.
TDCI licensing and regulation operates at the state level, not the city level. That’s fine. What Memphis could do at the local level is create clearer protocols for how private security interacts with MPD. Right now, the relationship is informal. A guard calls 911 like anyone else. There’s no dedicated liaison, no shared radio channel, no formal protocol for how private security reports feed into MPD’s crime analysis.
Some cities have built these bridges. Dallas has a formal partnership program that gives registered private security companies direct communication channels with police. Houston has a similar program. Memphis doesn’t.
The city could also do more to recognize private security’s role in its overall public safety strategy. According to industry estimates, there are roughly as many private security guards in the Memphis metro area as there are sworn MPD officers. That’s a significant force that operates in parallel to the police department with minimal coordination.
A mayor who’s serious about crime reduction would find ways to integrate that resource. Not by giving private guards police powers, which would be legally and practically problematic. Rather by creating information-sharing frameworks that let both sides work more effectively.
A City Running Two Systems
Memphis in 2022 is running two parallel security systems. One is public, funded by tax dollars, and represented by Strickland’s State of the City speech. The other is private, funded by business owners and property managers who can’t wait for MPD to solve their problems.
The public system gets the speeches, the budget appropriations, and the political attention. The private system gets the contracts, the late-night calls, and the daily grind of keeping commercial properties safe when patrol cars are responding to calls across town.
Neither system is sufficient on its own. MPD can’t be everywhere. Private security can’t arrest anyone. The gap between the two is where Memphis businesses live every day, spending money on guards while paying taxes for a police force that’s too small and too busy to protect their property directly.
Strickland’s bet on SCORPION and police funding might reduce crime over time. If it works, that’s good for the whole city. Yet even in the best-case scenario, the structural gap between public policing capacity and private security demand isn’t closing anytime soon.
For the businesses writing those security contracts each month, the State of the City speech changed nothing about their Tuesday morning.