A tire shop owner on Hickory Hill Road called me last Tuesday. Someone had backed a truck through his front gate overnight, loaded up four pallets of new tires, and driven off. His security cameras caught the whole thing. Clear images, license plate visible. He filed a report with Memphis PD. Two weeks later, no follow-up.
“I called three times,” he told me. “They took the report. That’s it.”
His story isn’t unusual. It’s the norm for commercial property crime in Memphis right now, and it’s reshaping how businesses across the city think about protection.
The Numbers Tell a Familiar Story
Memphis PD’s crime data through the first months of 2018 shows property crime holding at levels that would alarm most American cities. Auto theft remains the headline grabber, Memphis consistently ranks among the top five cities nationally for vehicle theft per capita. The city recorded over 9,500 motor vehicle thefts in 2017, and early 2018 numbers suggest the trend isn’t slowing.
Commercial burglary gets less attention in the media, but it’s the crime category that drives business owners to hire security guards. A residential burglary might cost a homeowner a TV and some jewelry. A commercial burglary can mean $20,000 in inventory, damaged equipment, and weeks of disruption.
The pattern is geographic and predictable. Hickory Hill, Whitehaven, Raleigh, Frayser, and parts of North Memphis carry the heaviest property crime burdens. These neighborhoods share common factors: aging commercial corridors with uneven lighting, strip malls with high tenant turnover creating vacant storefronts, and major roads that provide quick escape routes to the interstate system.
Drive down Winchester Road from Hickory Hill to the airport area on any weeknight after 10 PM. Count the darkened parking lots with no visible security presence. Those are the targets.
What Businesses Are Actually Doing
I spent February visiting business owners in three Memphis neighborhoods to understand how they’re responding. The answers varied by budget and desperation, but a clear trend emerged: businesses are spending money on private security at rates I haven’t seen before.
Hickory Hill: This neighborhood east of Germantown Parkway has been ground zero for commercial property crime conversations in Memphis for years. The Hickory Hill Community Empowerment Zone and local business associations have organized multiple meetings about security since late 2017. Several strip mall owners along Hickory Hill Road have pooled resources to hire shared patrol services. One group of six businesses splits the cost of an armed patrol car that circles their properties from 9 PM to 5 AM. The guard makes rounds every 45 minutes. Cost per business: roughly $400 per month.
“It’s cheaper than my insurance deductible,” one restaurant owner explained. She’d been burglarized twice in 2017. Both times the thieves took kitchen equipment: commercial mixers, a prep table, cases of cooking oil. The kind of stuff that’s easy to sell and impossible to trace.
Whitehaven: The Whitehaven business district along Elvis Presley Boulevard faces different challenges. Vehicle-related crime dominates: catalytic converter theft, smash-and-grab break-ins at retail locations, and auto theft from dealership lots. Two used car dealers I visited on Elvis Presley Boulevard near Shelby Drive now employ overnight guards specifically to prevent inventory theft.
One dealer, who asked me not to use his name, said he lost three vehicles off his lot in a single week last October. Three. He now pays a guard $15 an hour for 10 hours of overnight coverage, seven nights a week. That’s roughly $4,500 a month in guard costs. He considers it a bargain compared to losing $15,000-30,000 in vehicle inventory.
Raleigh: The Raleigh area around Austin Peay Highway and Stage Road has seen a surge in convenience store and gas station robberies alongside property crime. Business owners in this corridor describe a constant calculation: invest in security, or accept losses as a cost of operating in a high-crime area. Some have left. The vacancy rate along parts of Austin Peay tells that story.
The businesses that stay are hardening. Reinforced doors. Camera systems with remote monitoring. Armed guards during peak hours. A check-cashing business near the intersection of Yale Road and Stage installed a full perimeter fence with controlled access after their third break-in attempt in six months.
The Security Company Response
Memphis security companies report increased demand for commercial property patrols through late 2017 and into early 2018. The established local firms, Phelps Security on Park Avenue and Imperial Security on Poplar Avenue, are adding patrol vehicles and hiring officers to cover new accounts.
The national companies respond differently. Securitas and Allied Universal can scale quickly because they’re pulling from large labor pools, but their model focuses on standing guard posts rather than mobile patrol. A standing guard at a single location costs $18-25 per hour. A mobile patrol covering multiple properties can serve four or five businesses at a fraction of the per-client cost.
For small and mid-size businesses, mobile patrol has become the value play. The guard drives a marked vehicle, stops at each client location for 15-20 minutes, checks doors and windows, logs their visit electronically, and moves on. Visible enough to deter casual theft. Responsive enough to call police if they find something wrong.
The limitation is obvious. A patrol guard isn’t there when the crime happens, unless timing lines up. They’re a deterrent, not a guarantee. Business owners need to understand that distinction before they sign a contract expecting zero incidents.
Why Insurance Isn’t Enough
I hear this question regularly: why not just carry good insurance and skip the guard costs?
Insurance adjusters and I have a working relationship based on mutual frustration. They’re frustrated by inflated claims. I’m frustrated by their slow payments and policy exclusions. What we agree on is this: insurance is a terrible primary strategy for managing property crime.
Commercial insurance policies carry deductibles, typically $1,000-5,000 for property coverage. If someone steals $3,000 in goods and your deductible is $2,500, your claim nets you $500, minus the premium increase you’ll face at renewal.
Repeated claims trigger non-renewal. Two or three property crime claims in a 12-month period, and your insurer may drop you entirely. Finding replacement coverage for a business with multiple burglary claims in a high-crime ZIP code is expensive and sometimes impossible.
The math actually favors security spending in many cases. A business paying $1,500 per month for overnight patrol that prevents two burglaries a year is saving money compared to eating deductibles, premium increases, and operational disruption.
Technology: Help, Not a Solution
Camera systems have gotten dramatically cheaper and better in recent years. A business owner can install a 16-channel HD surveillance system with remote smartphone viewing for under $2,000. That’s a one-time cost that would’ve been $10,000 five years ago.
Cameras record crimes. They don’t prevent them. I’ve reviewed dozens of surveillance videos from Memphis business burglaries. The footage is often clear enough to identify the suspects. It rarely leads to arrests. Memphis PD’s property crime unit is overwhelmed. A clear surveillance image goes into a file that competes with thousands of other files for detective attention.
Alarm systems are better deterrents because they create immediate response. When they work, they’re effective. False alarm rates are a persistent problem. MPD has policies that deprioritize alarm calls from locations with frequent false activations. If your alarm goes off three times a month for no reason, you’re training the police to ignore it.
The most effective technology combination I’ve seen pairs cameras with live remote monitoring. A monitoring service watches your cameras in real time and dispatches a response (either their own patrol unit or police) when they observe suspicious activity. This costs $300-600 per month depending on hours covered. It bridges the gap between passive recording and active prevention.
What Needs to Change
Memphis needs more police officers. That’s the fundamental issue underneath everything I’ve written here. Private security fills a gap, and it fills it imperfectly. Guards can observe, deter, and report. They can’t investigate, arrest, or prosecute. The criminal justice pipeline starts with police, and Memphis doesn’t have enough of them.
Director Rallings has been straightforward about staffing challenges. Recruitment and retention compete with better-paying departments in Germantown, Collierville, and Bartlett. The suburban departments surrounding Memphis offer comparable starting pay with lower caseloads and less risk.
Until MPD reaches adequate staffing, and no one can agree on what that number actually is, private security will keep growing in Memphis. That growth isn’t a sign of a healthy security market. It’s a symptom of a public safety system under strain.
Business owners in Hickory Hill, Whitehaven, and Raleigh understand this. They’re not happy about writing checks for guard services. They’d rather have responsive police coverage. Since they can’t count on that, they’re protecting themselves.
I expect this spending trend to continue through 2018 and beyond. The businesses that survive in Memphis’s toughest commercial corridors will be the ones that treat security as a fixed operating cost: rent, utilities, insurance. Not optional. Required.