A month has passed since Memphis disbanded its SCORPION unit. The five former officers charged with murdering Tyre Nichols await trial. The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the Memphis Police Department. And on the ground level, in strip mall offices and dispatch centers across Shelby County, private security companies are drowning in work they can’t staff.
The numbers vary depending on who you ask. Conservative estimates from company owners put the demand increase at 25-30% compared to this time last year. Others say 40% or higher. One firm’s operations manager told me flat out: “We’ve turned down more contracts in February than we signed in all of Q4 2022.” Not because the contracts weren’t good. Because they didn’t have the guards to cover them.
The Scale of the Problem
To understand what’s happening, forget percentages for a minute and think about actual posts.
A typical mid-size Memphis security company might run 80 to 120 active posts on any given night. Each post needs a guard. Many need two : one for the front, one for the parking area or back entrance. When demand jumps 30-40%, that company needs 25 to 50 additional guards. Right now. Not next quarter.
Where do those guards come from? They don’t materialize. Tennessee’s licensed security guard pool in Shelby County was already stretched before January. Companies were running overtime schedules and double shifts to cover existing contracts. Adding 30% more volume to a system that was already maxed isn’t a staffing challenge. It’s a staffing crisis.
The national firms feel it too. Securitas, which runs significant operations in Memphis, has been pulling guards from their Nashville and Chattanooga offices to fill Memphis contracts. Allied Universal, the largest security company in North America, has done the same. That creates a trickle-down problem . Every guard sent to Memphis is a guard removed from somewhere else.
Walden Security, the Chattanooga-headquartered firm with a strong Tennessee presence, has been absorbing contracts in the Germantown and Collierville areas where residential demand spiked. Phelps Security, another regional operator, expanded their Memphis team in February. Everyone is hiring. Nobody is hiring fast enough.
Who’s Calling
The caller profile has shifted in interesting ways over the past month.
In the immediate aftermath of the bodycam footage release, calls came primarily from businesses. Restaurants, retail stores, gas stations, medical offices . Commercial clients who either lost their sense of safety or whose employees threatened to quit if security wasn’t added. Those calls haven’t stopped.
What’s grown since then is residential. Neighborhood associations that spent years debating whether private patrol was “worth the cost” have stopped debating. Homeowners in Hickory Hill, Raleigh-Frayser, and parts of Whitehaven are pooling funds for overnight patrol services. Some of these neighborhoods already had high crime rates and limited police response times. The SCORPION disbandment and the broader MPD dysfunction just eliminated the last argument against spending the money.
Church security is another growing segment. Several congregations in Memphis have reached out to security companies for Sunday service coverage. The reasoning varies, some cite the general climate of violence, others point to specific incidents near their buildings. One pastor in Orange Mound told me his deacons voted unanimously to hire an armed guard for every service. “We argued about this for two years,” he said. “Took about two days to decide this time.”
The Companies Trying to Keep Up
I spent two weeks talking to security firms across Memphis, trying to get a picture of who’s absorbing this demand and how they’re managing it.
Shield of Steel, the veteran-owned company operating out of their office on Lamar Avenue, is among the firms seeing the wave up close. Their staff comes from military and law enforcement backgrounds, which has turned into a major selling point in the current environment. Clients specifically ask whether guards have police or military training, and Shield of Steel can say yes across most of their roster.
Their approach to vetting . Background checks that go beyond the TDCI minimum, reference verification, and what they describe as a character-assessment process during hiring . Appeals to clients who are anxious about quality. GPS tracking on all patrol vehicles gives clients real-time visibility into where their guards are and what routes they’re running. For property managers and HOA boards writing checks for the first time, that transparency matters.
The trade-off is speed. Shield of Steel, like every quality-focused firm in Memphis right now, can’t onboard new clients as fast as those clients want. Wait times for new contract activation have stretched to three or four weeks. A business owner who calls today might not see a guard until late March. That delay isn’t incompetence. It’s a company that won’t deploy an untrained or inadequately vetted guard just because the phone won’t stop ringing. Still, for a restaurant owner whose staff is scared today, three weeks feels like an eternity.
The larger national firms have more bodies to move around, which is their advantage. They can transfer guards from other markets, draw from a national recruiting pipeline, and absorb contract volume that would overwhelm a smaller operator. The trade-off there is often less specialized knowledge of Memphis and higher turnover. A guard transferred in from Atlanta for a 90-day Memphis rotation doesn’t know the neighborhoods, doesn’t know the regular faces, doesn’t know which parking lot has a blind spot on the east side. That local knowledge takes time to build.
Guard Poaching Has Gotten Ugly
The worst consequence of the demand spike is what it’s done to workforce stability across the industry.
When every company needs guards and nobody has enough, the easiest recruiting strategy is stealing from your competitor. Offer a dollar more per hour. Promise better shifts. Throw in a sign-on bonus. A guard making $15 at Company A gets a call from Company B offering $17, thinks about their rent, and gives notice the next morning.
This has been happening for years in Memphis security on a small scale. It’s now happening at a pace that several company owners described as “destructive.” One operator told me he lost six guards in February alone, all to competitors offering more money. “I can match the wage or I can keep my margins,” he said. “I can’t do both.”
The arithmetic is brutal. Security companies bill clients a contract rate . Say $25 per hour for an armed guard. Out of that $25, the guard gets $18, insurance and workers’ comp takes $3, overhead and administration takes $2, and the company keeps $2 in profit. When a competitor offers the guard $20, the originating company either matches it and makes zero profit on that post or loses the guard and can’t cover the contract.
Multiply that across dozens of posts and you have companies that are busier than ever yet making less money per guard hour than they did six months ago. The demand spike is real. The profitability spike is not.
TDCI Licensing Pipeline Under Strain
The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance, which processes all security guard licenses through its Private Protective Services division, is seeing the demand wave hit their offices too.
New license applications have surged since late January. The exact numbers won’t be public for months, and TDCI declined to provide preliminary figures. Training academies, though, report full classes and waiting lists. One Memphis-based academy that runs armed guard certification courses told me they’ve added two additional sessions per month starting in March and could fill more if they had the instructors.
The 48-hour armed training requirement is the bottleneck everyone complains about. Forty-eight hours spread across multiple sessions means a prospective armed guard is looking at two to three weeks minimum just to complete training, before the licensing paperwork even begins. Add four to six weeks of TDCI processing time and you’re talking about a two-month pipeline from “I want to be a guard” to “I’m legally allowed to work an armed post.”
Two months. In a market where companies need guards yesterday.
Some companies have gotten creative. They hire people as unarmed guards , the 16-hour training requirement is faster to complete . And then sponsor them through armed certification while they’re already working. It fills the post, if imperfectly. An unarmed guard at an armed post isn’t ideal, and some contracts specifically require armed personnel. Still, it’s a warm body on site, which is better than an empty parking lot.
Where This Goes
The Memphis private security market in March 2023 is a pressure cooker with no release valve. Demand is high and rising. Supply is constrained and slow to expand. Wages are climbing, which is good for guards and difficult for companies. Poaching is destabilizing the workforce. And the licensing pipeline is too slow to produce new guards at the rate the market needs them.
None of these problems have quick fixes. TDCI could streamline licensing, and there are conversations happening about that. Training academies could expand capacity, and some are trying. Companies could raise wages across the board, and the market is forcing them to.
What won’t change is the underlying driver. Memphis’s relationship with its police department is broken. Rebuilding it will take years, assuming it can be rebuilt at all while a DOJ investigation hangs over everything. Until then, private security is the patch. It’s an expensive, imperfect, labor-constrained patch. And right now it’s the only one Memphis has.