The Department of Justice is investigating the Memphis Police Department. That sentence has been true for about two months now, and its implications are still barely understood by most people outside the law enforcement and legal communities. A DOJ pattern-or-practice investigation doesn’t just look at the Tyre Nichols case. It examines the entire department . Use-of-force policies, training standards, supervision practices, complaint processes, data collection, and the organizational culture that allowed five officers to beat a man to death on camera.
These investigations take years. The one in Louisville, triggered by Breonna Taylor’s killing, lasted more than a year before producing findings. The resulting consent decree will reshape Louisville Metro PD for a decade or longer. Ferguson, Missouri. Baltimore. Chicago. Minneapolis. The pattern is consistent: investigation, findings, consent decree, federal monitoring, and years of mandated changes that consume department resources and attention.
Memphis should expect the same trajectory. And every other police department in Tennessee should be watching closely.
The Fundamental Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Here it is, stated plainly: as police departments reform and potentially pull back from aggressive tactics, who fills the resulting gap in visible security presence?
The answer, increasingly, is private companies. That’s already happening in Memphis. It was happening before Tyre Nichols. His death accelerated a trend that was already visible to anyone paying attention.
The Memphis City Council has held multiple sessions on police oversight since February. Council members have proposed an independent review board with subpoena power, mandatory body camera activation policies, revised use-of-force standards, and restrictions on specialized units. These are serious proposals from serious people. They also represent constraints on how MPD operates.
Constraints are the point. The SCORPION unit operated with minimal oversight and maximum aggression. Constraining that approach is necessary and appropriate. The unintended consequence is a police department that does less . Fewer stops, fewer patrols in certain areas, fewer proactive interventions. Not because officers are lazy, and that explanation insults the many good officers still on the force. Because the institutional risk calculus has changed. When aggressive policing leads to murder charges and federal investigations, departments get cautious. That caution creates space. Private security fills it.
Legal Authority: The Line That Matters
This is where the conversation gets dangerous, and I mean that literally.
A Memphis police officer has the legal authority to stop you, detain you, search you, arrest you, and in extreme circumstances use lethal force under color of law. A private security guard has essentially the same authority as any private citizen. They can observe. They can report. In most circumstances, they can ask you to leave private property. They can make a citizen’s arrest for felonies committed in their presence. That’s roughly where their legal authority ends.
Tennessee law, specifically the Private Protective Services Act, defines what security guards can and cannot do. The distinction between a licensed guard and a police officer is not minor. It’s fundamental. A guard who exceeds their authority isn’t just doing something wrong . They’re potentially committing a crime themselves.
This matters because some of the contracts being signed in Memphis right now effectively ask private security to perform functions that were previously police work. Neighborhood patrol isn’t just driving around and checking locks. It’s responding to suspicious activity, encountering people in distress, and sometimes facing armed confrontation. A police officer responding to those situations has backup, dispatch, qualified immunity, and decades of case law defining their authority. A security guard has a radio, maybe a firearm if they’re licensed for it, and a much less clear legal framework.
The liability exposure for security companies operating in this expanded role is significant. If a guard confronts a trespasser who turns violent, the legal analysis of that encounter depends on dozens of variables that most guards aren’t trained to evaluate in real time. Companies with strong training programs mitigate this risk. Companies rushing to fill posts with minimally trained guards are creating liability time bombs.
Nashville Watches From a Different Position
Nashville’s relationship with private security looks nothing like Memphis’s right now, and that difference is instructive.
The Metro Nashville Police Department has its own problems, recruitment shortfalls, retention challenges, and periodic controversies. What it doesn’t have is a federal investigation and a nationally televised police murder. That changes the dynamic entirely.
Nashville’s private security growth is driven by economics, not crisis. The city is booming. Construction, tourism, entertainment, corporate expansion. Security demand is rising because there’s more stuff to protect, not because the police can’t be trusted. That’s a healthier growth driver and it produces a different relationship between the industry and the community.
Nashville’s approach to police reform has also been more gradual. The Community Oversight Board, established after a 2018 referendum, provides civilian review of MNPD. It’s imperfect. Critics say it lacks teeth. Supporters say it provides accountability without the trauma of a DOJ investigation. Either way, it means Nashville is processing its police-community tensions through an institutional mechanism rather than a catastrophic event.
The result for private security in Nashville is steady growth with manageable dynamics. Companies can plan their hiring, negotiate contracts at reasonable rates, and maintain quality standards. Memphis’s crisis-driven pivot produces the opposite . Frantic hiring, inflated expectations, corners cut, and an industry struggling to maintain its own standards while demand swamps capacity.
The Accountability Problem
Here’s what worries me about the current trajectory.
Private security companies in Tennessee are regulated by TDCI’s Private Protective Services division. That regulation covers licensing, training minimums, and basic operational standards. What it doesn’t cover, at least not with the same rigor that applies to police, is use-of-force reporting, complaint investigation, or systematic performance review.
When a Memphis police officer uses force, there’s a reporting requirement, a review process, and . In theory, accountability through the chain of command. When a private security guard uses force, the reporting obligation is to their employer. That employer decides whether to investigate, discipline, or ignore. TDCI can revoke a license for cause, and they do sometimes. The process is slower and less transparent than police internal affairs.
As private security takes on more quasi-police functions in Memphis and potentially other Tennessee cities, the accountability gap grows. Communities that turned to private security because they couldn’t trust the police are placing trust in an industry with less oversight, less transparency, and less public accountability than the institution they’ve lost faith in.
That’s not an argument against private security. It’s an argument for updating the regulatory framework to match the industry’s expanding role. If guards are patrolling neighborhoods and responding to incidents in ways that look a lot like policing, the oversight should look at least somewhat like police oversight. Tennessee’s current framework wasn’t designed for this reality.
What Other States Are Doing
Tennessee isn’t the only state grappling with this. California passed legislation in 2020 increasing training requirements for private security and creating new reporting obligations. New York has long required security guards to complete annual refresher training. Illinois reformed its licensing process after a series of incidents involving undertrained guards.
The common thread is reactive reform. States wait for problems, then update their rules. Tennessee has the opportunity to get ahead of the curve . The demand surge is happening now, the regulatory framework hasn’t caught up, and the window for proactive reform is open.
Whether the Tennessee legislature acts is a political question as much as a policy one. Security industry lobbyists have mixed feelings about additional regulation. More rules mean more compliance costs. They also mean higher barriers to entry, which protects established companies from fly-by-night competitors. The companies with the strongest training programs and the best operational practices generally support reasonable regulation because it validates what they’re already doing and penalizes those cutting corners.
TDCI has the authority to update administrative rules without legislative action in some areas. Whether they exercise that authority in 2023 depends on political will and staff capacity, both of which are limited.
The Road From Here
Memphis will spend years processing what happened. The DOJ investigation, the criminal trials, the civil lawsuits, the policy reforms . None of these will resolve quickly. And throughout all of it, private security will play a larger role in daily safety than it did before January 7th.
That’s not inherently good or bad. It’s a fact that requires honest engagement from the industry, from regulators, and from communities that are writing checks to security companies because they feel they have no other choice.
The industry’s job now is to prove it deserves the trust being placed in it. Not through marketing or press releases. Through training, through accountability, through transparent operations, and through honest conversations about what private security can and cannot do.
The communities’ job is to demand that proof. Don’t hire the cheapest bid. Ask about training standards, insurance coverage, complaint processes, and use-of-force policies. The questions you’d ask of a police department, you should ask of the company patrolling your street.
And Tennessee’s regulators need to decide whether the current framework is adequate for an industry that’s about to get much bigger and much more visible. The answer, based on everything I’ve seen over the past three months, is no.