I got a call last Tuesday from a security company owner in Bartlett who sounded like he hadn’t slept in three days. He had six new hires ready to start work. Six people who’d passed interviews, drug tests, and preliminary screening. They were sitting at home, waiting. Not because they didn’t want to work. Because the state of Tennessee can’t process their guard cards.
This is happening everywhere right now.
The Normal Process, When It Works
Under T.C.A. 62-35-101 and the statutes that follow it, Tennessee regulates private protective services through the Department of Commerce and Insurance, known as TDCI. If you want to work as a security guard in this state, here’s what you’re supposed to do:
Fill out an application. Schedule a fingerprinting appointment through IdentoGO, which is run by a company called IDEMIA. Get your prints taken. Those prints go to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the FBI for a background check. Complete your training requirements. If you’re going armed, that’s 48 hours of classroom and range instruction. Submit everything. Wait for your registration card.
On a good day, the whole thing takes a few weeks. Maybe a month if the TBI is backed up. It’s not fast, and nobody in the industry has ever called it convenient. Still, it works. Or it did.
Then COVID Hit
TDCI put out guidance on March 20 telling licensees how to handle the pandemic. The department shifted staff to remote work. Processing slowed down almost immediately.
That was the easy part.
The real bottleneck started with fingerprinting. IdentoGO locations across Tennessee either closed outright or cut their hours to almost nothing. The closest open appointment for a Memphis applicant in late March was in Jackson, over 80 miles east on I-40. By April, some applicants were reporting wait times of three to four weeks just to get a fingerprint appointment. Not to get results. Just to get in the door and put their fingers on the scanner.
I talked to a training coordinator on Summer Avenue who told me she had a class of twelve people scheduled for the first week of April. Eight of them couldn’t get fingerprinted beforehand. The class ran with four students. She lost money on the room rental.
The Training Problem
Armed security guards in Tennessee need 48 hours of training. That’s classroom time covering legal authority, use of force, report writing, first aid, and a bunch of other topics. Then there’s range qualification. You can’t do any of that over Zoom.
When Shelby County’s health directive limited indoor gatherings, most training facilities shut down or went to skeleton capacity. A classroom that held twenty students could maybe seat eight with proper distancing. Some instructors didn’t want to risk it at all. A few kept running classes in smaller groups, but they had to charge more per student to cover their costs.
One instructor I know in Frayser was running two-person sessions in his garage. He said he felt ridiculous doing it. “I’m teaching use-of-force law to two guys sitting six feet apart in lawn chairs,” he told me. “This isn’t how you train professionals.”
The range portion created its own headaches. Indoor ranges that stayed open had ventilation concerns. Outdoor ranges filled up with recreational shooters who’d bought guns during the pandemic panic-buying wave. Finding range time for a training class meant competing with every new gun owner in Shelby County.
Background Checks Are Crawling
Even if you manage to get fingerprinted and trained, you’re still waiting on the TBI and FBI to run your background check. Both agencies shifted resources during the pandemic. The FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division in West Virginia, where all the federal checks funnel through, was dealing with its own staffing issues.
Pre-COVID, a clean background check might come back in ten days. Two weeks on the outside. Right now, security company owners are telling me they’re seeing four to six weeks. One applicant in Cordova submitted his paperwork in mid-April and still hadn’t heard anything by the end of May. Six weeks of silence.
TDCI hasn’t published official processing time estimates since March. I’ve called their office three times in the past two weeks. Twice I got voicemail. The third time, a staffer told me they were “working through a backlog” and couldn’t give me a timeline. She was polite about it. That doesn’t help the guy in Cordova.
Renewals Are Another Mess
New applicants aren’t the only ones getting squeezed. Existing guards need to renew their registrations, and that process has its own problems.
Tennessee guard registrations expire, and the renewal window isn’t generous. If you miss it, you’re technically working without valid credentials. Some guards whose renewals came due in April or May couldn’t get their paperwork processed in time. TDCI did announce some flexibility on deadlines early in the pandemic, but the details were vague. Multiple company owners told me they’re not sure which extensions apply to which license types.
“I’ve got a guard whose card expired May 15,” one operations manager in Whitehaven told me. “He mailed his renewal in April. We haven’t heard back. Is he legal to work? I honestly don’t know. I’m putting him on shifts because I don’t have anyone else.”
That’s not a comfortable position for anyone. Not the company, not the guard, not the client.
Companies Are Desperate
Here’s the part that makes this more than a bureaucratic inconvenience. Memphis is in the middle of a security staffing crisis, and the licensing bottleneck is making it worse.
Demand for security guards went up this spring. Hospitals needed guards to manage entrance screening. Grocery stores and pharmacies wanted officers for crowd control. Vacant commercial properties (and there are a lot of them now) needed patrol coverage. Hotels and office buildings downtown needed someone to monitor buildings that were mostly empty.
Security firms had the applicants. The labor pool actually grew because of layoffs in other industries. People who’d been driving for FedEx or working at the Wolfchase Galleria suddenly needed jobs, and security work was hiring.
The problem is getting those people licensed. One mid-size company owner on Poplar Avenue told me he’s turned away three contracts since April because he can’t staff them. “I’ve got the people. I’ve got the clients. I can’t get the state to process the paper,” he said.
Armed Guards Have It Worst
If you think unarmed guard licensing is slow right now, try getting an armed registration.
The 48-hour training requirement is the killer. With limited class sizes and fewer instructors willing to teach, the pipeline for armed guards has essentially narrowed to a trickle. Pre-COVID, a motivated applicant could get through armed training in about a week if they found a good program. Now you’re looking at two to three weeks minimum, assuming you can find a class with an open seat.
And armed guards are exactly what clients want right now. Property managers with empty buildings want armed patrol. Retailers dealing with increased shoplifting want armed presence. The demand is there. The supply chain for qualified, licensed armed officers is broken.
What Needs to Happen
I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers here. Some of this is genuinely hard. You can’t do fingerprinting over the internet, and you shouldn’t hand someone a gun after watching a YouTube video.
A few things would help, though.
TDCI could publish clear, updated processing timelines so companies can plan. Right now everyone is guessing, and guessing costs money.
IdentoGO needs more open appointments in the Memphis metro area. Telling a Shelby County applicant to drive to Jackson or Dyersburg for fingerprints is absurd.
The state could temporarily allow partial online delivery for the classroom portions of armed training: legal topics, report writing, first aid. Keep the hands-on stuff in person. Split the 48 hours into remote-eligible and in-person components.
And renewals need a clear, published extension policy. Not a vague promise of flexibility. Guards and companies need to know exactly where they stand.
The Real Cost
Every week this drags on, security companies lose contracts. Guards lose income. And the businesses and properties that need protection go without it. Memphis doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for the bureaucracy to catch up on its own schedule. Crime isn’t taking a break while TDCI works through its backlog.
I’ll keep checking in on this. If you’re an applicant stuck in the system or a company dealing with the bottleneck, I want to hear from you. The more specific examples we can document, the harder it is for Nashville to ignore what’s happening on the ground here.