I was sitting in a coffee shop on South Main last Tuesday morning when a property manager I know walked in and dropped a printout on the table. She had circled a number in red ink. Seventy-six. That was the average number of Part 1 crimes being reported in Memphis every day so far in March. In January it had been sixty-two. In February, almost seventy.
“Every month this year is worse than the one before it,” she said. She ordered a coffee and did not sit down.
I picked up the printout. The data came from the city’s crime dashboard and had been passed around at a Downtown Memphis Commission meeting the week prior. Fox 13 ran the story five days ago. The headline was bland, the kind of thing you scroll past. Something about crime “slightly increasing.” The numbers underneath it told a sharper story.
She manages nine commercial properties across Shelby County. Three of them sit within a mile of Beale Street. And between March 20 and March 24, three separate shootings happened in the heart of downtown Memphis. Two near Beale on the night of the 20th, both resulting in arrests, both leaving someone hurt. A third in Tom Lee Park on the afternoon of the 24th. One woman injured.
“I had a tenant call me at six in the morning wanting to break their lease,” she told me later by phone. “They read about the Tom Lee Park shooting on their lunch break.”
That is the version of Memphis that does not show up in the task force press releases.
The Task Force Has Numbers. So Does Spring.
President Trump flew to Memphis on March 23, the day between those shootings. He held a roundtable. He talked about the Memphis Safe Task Force and its results. The White House released updated figures the same week: seven thousand three hundred and forty-two arrests since September 2025. Forty-four for homicide. Ninety-four for sexual offenses. Eight hundred and twelve drug arrests. More than six thousand related to guns. They also reported 1,219 illegal firearms seized and 150 missing children located.
Those are real numbers. The overall crime rate in Memphis is still down more than 43% compared to the same period a year ago. Motor vehicle thefts down 67%. Robberies down 51%. Homicides down 35%. By any reasonable measure, the task force is producing results.
And yet.
Walk along Second Street on a Friday night in March and count the patrol vehicles. I did this on the 21st, the night after the two Beale Street shootings. I counted four MPD cruisers, a National Guard vehicle idling near the Orpheum, and two private security sedans working the FedEx Forum perimeter. One of the private guards was standing outside his car talking on his phone. He told me he had been posted there since four in the afternoon.
“We picked up extra shifts this month,” he said. “The company told us to expect more through May.”
He would not give me his name or his company. Fair enough.
62 to 76 in Three Months
Here is what the month-by-month data actually looks like when you stop averaging it. January: about sixty-two Part 1 crimes per day across the entire city. February: almost seventy. March, through last week: almost seventy-six. That is a 22% increase from January to March, happening while the task force is still on the ground, while the National Guard is still patrolling, while the White House is still celebrating.
Memphis Police Chief CJ Davis acknowledged it in front of the city council on March 24. She talked about the pattern that anyone who has lived here already knows. Crime goes up when the weather gets warm. It has done this for decades. “Sometimes when young people have nothing to do, they move to the Downtown space, especially as the weather gets warmer,” Davis said.
Mayor Paul Young echoed her. He said conversations were happening again about enforcing the city’s 1996 curfew ordinance. “We think that it’s unacceptable to have 14-year-olds running around Downtown at 11:30 at night, in the entertainment district, and on Beale Street where there are bars and adult activities taking place,” Young said during a March 23 press conference.
If that sounds familiar, it should. Memphis has been having this exact conversation every spring for years. In 2023, after a mass shooting near Beale Street that injured eight people, the city tried barricades, metal detectors, pat-downs. A plan to address juveniles downtown got drafted by MPD, was called a “rough draft,” then shelved. A curfew enforcement plan followed. Also shelved.
What This Means If You Run a Business
I called three security company owners in Shelby County last week. All three said the same thing without coordinating their answers: spring is when their phones ring.
One of them, who operates out of an office on Getwell Road and runs about forty officers across east Memphis, told me his new-client calls tripled between mid-February and mid-March. “People read about the shootings and then they call,” he said. “Doesn’t matter that crime is down year over year. They read about three shootings downtown in one week and they call.”
A second owner, a woman who runs a smaller firm with clients mostly in Germantown and Cordova, said she has been turning down work. Not because she does not want it. Because she cannot staff it. The same problem that has plagued the industry for two years. “I need four more armed officers and I cannot find them,” she said. “I put an ad on ZipRecruiter and I get thirty applications. Maybe five pass the background check. Maybe two show up for training.”
ZipRecruiter’s data backs her up. The average hourly pay for private security in Tennessee right now is $17.28. For armed work, it is higher, but not by much. Glassdoor lists 1,262 open security positions across the state. That is a lot of unfilled chairs.
The third owner, based closer to midtown, put it this way: “The task force did the hard thing. They got the arrest numbers up and the crime numbers down. The part nobody wants to talk about is what happens when the calendar flips to April and May and June and those numbers start climbing the way they always do. Are there enough officers, federal or private or otherwise, to hold it?”
He did not answer his own question. He just looked out the window.
The Curfew That Never Sticks
The curfew conversation is worth paying attention to because it tells you something about the limits of enforcement. Memphis has had a juvenile curfew on the books since 1996. It has almost never been consistently enforced. Every spring, someone brings it up. Every spring, implementation hits the same wall: you need a designated place to take minors when you pick them up, you need staff to run that place, and you need buy-in from community groups who worry about how it will be applied.
Davis called it a “very sensitive issue” in front of the council. She is not wrong. The task force has made more than 200 juvenile arrests since September. The Tennessee Lookout reported in February that only 6% of the task force’s first 3,000 arrests appeared to be white. Those numbers have created their own set of questions, ones that city leaders are navigating carefully.
For businesses, though, the curfew question matters for a simpler reason. If the city cannot or will not keep teenagers away from entertainment districts after midnight, then the security gap falls on property owners. That means private guards. That means budgets.
What to Do With This Information
If you manage property in Memphis, particularly downtown or in areas near entertainment corridors, the next eight weeks are your highest-risk window. Crime has ticked up each month this year and it will very likely keep climbing through May and June. History says so. The data says so. The police chief says so.
Talk to your security provider now, not in May when everyone else is calling. If you are using an unarmed service, ask whether they offer armed upgrade options. If you are not using any third-party security, this is the quarter to start. The three company owners I spoke with all said the same thing: the clients who plan ahead in March and April get the officers they need. The ones who call in June get a waiting list.
One of them told me he keeps a whiteboard in his office with two columns. One says “staffed” and one says “waiting.” In March, the staffed column is longer. By June, the waiting column always wins.
I drove past Tom Lee Park on my way home that evening. The sun was going down behind the bridge. A couple was walking a dog near the spot where the shooting had happened three days earlier. There was no police tape. No sign anything had happened at all. Just the river and the park and two people walking like it was any other Tuesday.
The park does not remember. The numbers do.