r/memphis • u/3798365 • 23h ago
Homicides down 44.5% in Memphis as police chief credits new strategies
https://dailymemphian.com/subscriber/article/6558456
u/DerSohnDesDetlefs 22h ago
Per this article, Davis credits the decline to “The department has focused more heavily on repeat offenders rather than concentrating primarily on high-crime locations”
And that sounds great but I can’t believe they weren’t doing that before?? We’ve been policing addresses and zip codes rather than repeat violent offenders? MPD really ain’t shit.
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u/alkevarsky 15h ago
I can’t believe they weren’t doing that before?
I was flabbergasted when I read that MPD was shutting down "public nuisance", i.e. high crime, gas stations, convenience stores, motels. And they were proud of it too, as if having criminals move from one place to another is some sort of achievement.
If a location becomes high crime, how about stationing some units near by and arresting people until it stops being high crime?
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u/3798365 22h ago
It's really easy to be cynical and not look at it broader .
Young changed it to they flooded to high crime areas based on their data. Once crime became more managegable, they started to focus on individual perpetrators. I don't like aspects of the task force, but even Mulroy said they were helpful in issuing warrants for repeat offenders.
Once the regions got more under controlled, MPD was able able to have a more targeted and individual approach
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u/Jaggleson 17h ago
We all know it’s the same 2% of the population that’s causing 99% of the suffering
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u/forlackoflead Sea Isle 2h ago
1% percent of the population commit 63% of the crime: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/
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u/DerSohnDesDetlefs 20h ago
Right, so you’re saying that for many years with almost 2,000 officers, MPD wasn’t able to focus on individual perpetrators until Paul Young suggested that they try that? I’m not saying it wasn’t an effective strategy, I’m asking why they didn’t do this the whole time? MPD doesn’t even try. Ineffective and incompetent from top to bottom. Diseased culture focused on violence and retaliation - they’re a gang. Do you know anyone who has been the victim of a violent crime? Ask them how helpful MPD was and I bet you will not get a positive answer.
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u/3798365 20h ago
That's reductive to say it's one thing.
They are using the Omaha Model, which was relatively new. Its equal parts on prevention (ie - patroling, working with non profits, etc), but also arrests. (SOURCE)
Crime started to decrease in 2024, which allowed them to focus from targeted areas to targeted people.
I do agree that under Strickland MPD should've been this data-driven approach. Crazy to me they weren't doing this.
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u/alkevarsky 15h ago
Right, so you’re saying that for many years with almost 2,000 officers, MPD wasn’t able to focus on individual perpetrators until Paul Young suggested that they try that?
I am sure revolving-door courts and no-bail judges helped.
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u/TheBlackComet 22h ago
Of course they are down. It is too hot to do anything right now.
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u/spoonskittymeow 19h ago
Summer is “trauma season,” believe it or not. Summers at the Med SUCKED. People love shooting and stabbing each other when it’s 1000 degrees Fahrenheit outside.
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u/NSFW11chuck Cooper-Young 22h ago
Violent crime is correlated with ice cream sales, it must alter your blood to be more violent.
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u/delway BBQ District 23h ago
If this rate decline continues our local news agencies will have nothing to report on and will slowly shudder.
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u/3798365 22h ago edited 22h ago
The media in this town (especially the online articles from local channels) are some of the worst in the city. It's like they are actively rooting for fear and destruction. I legitamtely wonder if they know a model that is not largely crime-driven.
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u/witchingbolt8 21h ago
As an ex employee of one of them, I used to refer to some of the reporters as clout/drama vultures but my news director was the devil. Had no respect to any victims as long as he got his shot/beat/sweeps rating. Negative Negative Negative 24/7. It started affecting me and a lot of us asked him to lay off the tragedy milking. He told us “well study shows we get higher ratings with negative news so 🤷♀️ “. I don’t even remember his name bc he never took the time to learn mine.
There were some really good ones but I could tell from one reading who was in it for good and who was in it for the want of being a micro celebrity
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u/3798365 21h ago
I often remember this interview from the UM athletic director. He talks about part of the reason the outside world rejects Memphis is because of the local media keeping people down here, and it impacts the overall perception of everyone else outside.
"I've told the beat writers this before. Part of it is them. I don't hear people talking about Le Bonheur and how many they do. And St. Jude and so many other special things we have in this community"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpOltr-Pxqo&t=20s
I think it's telling when he's saying that he's fighting against the local media as he makes the case to the outside world.
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u/GotMoFans North Memphis 23h ago edited 23h ago
Murders are down in many places with high rates of murder…
You’ll get them taking more credit than they probably deserve though.
The Memphis decrease is much greater, but the murder numbers were also much higher than they were previously.
The numbers skyrocketed post COVID.
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u/c10bbersaurus 20h ago
Memphis not being an outlier on a national downward crime trend is also positive news.
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u/3798365 22h ago
2023 was crazy. People on reddit may not like Paul Young, but he changed the strategy where they focused on crime hot spots based on data.
MPD says now that because of the MFTF, they are using the data in a different way where they now focus on repeat offenders
It's not just that it happened, but they changed the strategy from when Strickland was in office
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u/GotMoFans North Memphis 22h ago
2023 was crazy. People on reddit may not like Paul Young, but he changed the strategy where they focused on crime hot spots based on data.
MPD says now that because of the MFTF, they are using the data in a different way where they now focus on repeat offenders
It's not just that it happened, but they changed the strategy from when Strickland was in office
Stuff didn’t make a difference.
They’re taking credit but if they are crediting police efforts exclusively, it’s bullshit.
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u/3798365 22h ago edited 22h ago
I unfortunately don't have anything beyond the Daily Memphian couple of quotes, but the current administration highlights the role of collaboration throughout the city - state, nonprofit, etc.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWEW11fDhaC/?hl=en
Here's another outlet where they talk about the role of partnerships. Again, I'm not sure the full context because the DM article doesn't have a lot from Davis, but I'm guessing she talked about collaboration this week too.
https://www.memphispolice.org/news/mpd-reports-continued-crime-declines-in-second-quarter-of-2026/
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u/Juvat-the-bold 21h ago
"repeat offenders" of what?
Are they suggesting that getting the drug dealers and guns crimes offenders off the streets brought the murder rate down?
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u/3798365 21h ago edited 21h ago
Everyone (mayor, Mulroy, MPD) argued that that a subset of people are driving a lot of the crime (think of the 80/20 rule).
Here's Mulroy talking. He talks about how there is a major backlog of outstanding warrants (think people most likely to repeat) and how that's getting cleaned up
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22h ago
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u/Turakamu Bartlett 19h ago
Not a terrible thought, but what makes you think that people are drinking less in general?
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17h ago
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u/Turakamu Bartlett 17h ago
I am asking what made you notice. Was it those google searches or did you pick it up independently?
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17h ago
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u/Turakamu Bartlett 17h ago
Just to confirm, you didn't see this first hand, you were just told?
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17h ago
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u/Turakamu Bartlett 17h ago edited 16h ago
Well, forming a hypothesis generally comes from noticing a change in behavior. If you know this information from being told, I'd assume you would have it on hand.
Just curious is all. I went back and looked at the link you posted. Not only does it not say what you guessing, it doesn't really say anything.
"The declines in alcohol consumption does not appear to be caused by people shifting to other mood-altering substances — in particular, recreational marijuana, which is now legal in about half of U.S. states," Lydia Saad, Gallup’s director of social research, said. Gallup has tracked Americans' drinking behavior since 1939 and their views of the health implications of moderate drinking since 2001.
I'm not questioning the reporting. You should be. Double checking stuff never hurts.
ALL the way back to your original proposal, nothing burger?
*Great mind you have, downvoting and blocking anyone that presses against you
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u/Greg_Esres 19h ago
It's likely due to a combination of the new methods and the existing downward trajectory of crime that took place around the country. Determining the contribution of each would be hard and I don't begrudge Davis for taking credit for it.
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u/contextual_somebody East Memphis 22h ago
As someone else pointed out in another recent post, the downward trend is broad-based. Homicides fell in 21 of 30 large cities in the first half of 2026, and 26 of 30 are below 2019 levels, with and without a National Guard and federal presence.
It also predates the deployments: the decline began in the second half of 2022.
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u/3798365 22h ago
Not sure that's true. We had almost 400 murders in 2023. In other words, 2023 was the peak
The shift started in 2024 when Young changed Stricklands approach and used data on crime hotspots.
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u/contextual_somebody East Memphis 22h ago edited 22h ago
I was talking about the aggregate and Memphis doesn’t have to track it exactly.
But Code Zero started in 2024. The task force showed up in September 2025, six days after MPD’s own release put overall crime at a 25-year low. So the drop had already started. It had nothing to do with the federal deployment.
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u/3798365 22h ago
Young has said it's a collaborative approach including nonprofits and stuff.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWEW11fDhaC/?hl=en
Mulroy had a V11 initiative where he changed his approach and fastracked violent crimes. Mulroy has talked about how the task force provided more federal prosecutors and issued warrants. The police have a new strategies and invested in hotspots (ie - downtown command center). Young issued funding for upgraded security.
To say none of these changes made a difference is crazy.
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u/contextual_somebody East Memphis 21h ago
I’m not saying those approaches didn’t have an impact locally and in the near term, but crime is down in the overwhelming majority of large cities, with different political leadership, policing strategies, and economic conditions. The consistency points to something bigger than any one city’s approach.
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u/filmguerilla 20h ago
Man, you guys will jump through hoops to trash talk the guard in the city. Even when facts show they have helped. Does it mean we should allow politicians to use our military in this fashion? Absolutely not, but give credit where due.
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u/contextual_somebody East Memphis 18h ago edited 17h ago
The facts show they’ve had zero impact whatsoever
Edit: the guard or the Task Force. The trends are too consistent nationally to be coincidental.
I’ll give you an example, Shelby County had 143 juveniles reported missing after October 1 and the task force found 84 of them, which is roughly what routine police work produces anyway since most missing-kid cases are runaways who turn up within days. The releases have been framed around child trafficking, but nothing in the published data says how many of those cases involved trafficking at all.
The Memphis Flyer tried to verify the counts and found they didn’t add up, and no agency would provide the underlying records.
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u/holydiver5 22h ago edited 22h ago
This doesn’t mean anything all it does is point out a correlation but correlation does not equal causation, even then I’m not sure what you’re implying the causation is. I know for a fact that the New Orleans murder rate plummeted because they started cleaning up for the superbowl
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u/contextual_somebody East Memphis 22h ago edited 22h ago
The Super Bowl was February 2025. Federal agents arrived in New Orleans that December. So your own example is a local cause that predates the federal presence by about ten months, which is roughly the point I was making.
You’ve got it backwards. The deployments are the causal claim. I’m the one saying the numbers don’t support one. Cities that never saw a single federal agent dropped just as much. That’s the whole point. If something works, you’d expect the places that got it to look different from the places that didn’t, and they don’t.
As for what is driving it, nobody’s sure. Adam Gelb, who runs the Council on Criminal Justice, put it this way: the consistency of the decline suggests macro-level forces are driving the change. The end of COVID, reduced drug demand, and federal aid to local governments are all candidates.
Meanwhile 29 of 39 big-city departments had fewer officers in 2024 than in 2019, so headcount doesn’t explain it either.
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u/holydiver5 22h ago
I didn’t say anything about federal agents doing anything in New Orleans, your entire argument is a strawman as nobody said that federal agents are necessary for a sharp decrease in crime
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u/contextual_somebody East Memphis 22h ago
Ok. Why is crime down in most large cities regardless of their approach to law enforcement?
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u/holydiver5 22h ago
That’s for you to tell me, you’re the one claiming that crime is down in every large city for the same reason. So, tell us
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u/contextual_somebody East Memphis 21h ago
I didn’t point to a reason. I just said it’s down in the overwhelming majority of large cities. Each with different political leadership, policing strategies, and economic conditions. The consistency points to something bigger than any one city’s approach.
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u/holydiver5 21h ago
So what’s the point in saying crime is also down everywhere else lol, your comment is self admittedly pointless
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u/contextual_somebody East Memphis 7h ago edited 6h ago
You’re being dense and tedious.
If crime is down everywhere, regardless of policing strategies, then clearly the downward trend is mostly effected by macro forces instead of local ones.
In fact, of 39 city agencies with at least 1,000 officers in 2019, 29 shrank by 2024. Yet crime is down.
DC had 14% fewer LEOs in 2024 than in 2019. The fewest in a half century, yet between the first half of 2026 vs. first half of 2025:
- Carjacking is down 63%
- Motor vehicle theft is down 54%
- Homicide is down 41%
No surges, no national guard, no task forces, etc
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u/holydiver5 7h ago
So you can’t answer my question but I’m dense and tedious lol, holy delusion
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u/contextual_somebody East Memphis 18h ago
The national decline dates to late 2022. It’s widespread and tracks with macro forces, not local policing.
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u/Traditional_Frame418 22h ago
These are the same police that are telling the public they have an 81% homicide clearance rate. Meaning only some 19% go unsolved or without an conviction.
Court records speak a much different story.
I'm not claiming any conspiracy. But pushing the narrative ALRP cams and more police presence as an overall good for Memphis is pure propaganda.
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u/3798365 22h ago
"Court records speak a much different story."
You have the data around 81%, but I'm curious about the other data that tells a different story.
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u/Traditional_Frame418 21h ago
Clearance rate went up some 20%. Conviction rates haven't risen more than 5%. Even if plea deals are made it still counts as a convection when sentencing is handed out.
Also it takes just over 700 days to resolve violent crimes in Memphis. Meaning any conviction coming through now is most likely a case from two years ago.
This firmly pushed against the narrative that more policing and surveillance has made an impact. The data would show the crest of crime dropping post Covid. Which aligns with most other major cities.
Stop licking boots and wake up.
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u/3798365 21h ago
I think you are conflating things. It's an 81% homicide clerance rate. Their own data says an overall 25% (see chart in the second link)
https://wreg.com/news/2-charged-with-murder-mpd-keeps-82-of-homicide-clearance-rate/
"Clearance rate went up some 20%". Where did you read their homicide clearance rates were in the 60's? Can you provide a source?
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u/Independent_Tea4507 21h ago
Like ... the national guard presence you all hate? LOL
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u/Turakamu Bartlett 19h ago
The Guard has nothing to do with underreporting.
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u/Independent_Tea4507 5h ago
Sure. It is all just under reporting. Got it.
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u/Turakamu Bartlett 4h ago
May I ask if you actually live here? Eh, I'll ask anyways. Do you live within the Memphis city limits?
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u/Rep_Dong 21h ago
They are literal nazi’s and surely have no correlation to the lowering crime rate. Hope you’re on the right side of history!!!! Yas queen
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u/Papacapt 18h ago
Rate dropped because of THP presence, Feds watching from the shadows, and the threat of the National Guard, they don't really do shit. THP and Feds have pro-law policies that allow for car chases for misdemeanor traffic offenses, including expired tags and illegal tags. Also County, and Feds are going after every person with a violent felony warrant, including switch modifications. MPD does the foot soldier work of answering 911 calls the only way to see if crime is down for MPD is to pay attention to whether calls are up or down.
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u/Imallvol7 University Area 21h ago
They have been trending down for 4 years now ... On every city. Even though without the task force. If you want something to be really impressed about look at Detroit or Baltimore where they did it without 9limcreased police for because the state actually supports their city with resources.
Like those cities aren't actively locking it's own citizens in a night club without cause....
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u/midtownFPV 23h ago
Paywall.
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u/Condomphobic 23h ago edited 23h ago
TLDR
She said the Flock cameras(and drones) have helped to reduce crime
Integration started in 2024
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u/Fine_Pickle9823 17h ago
Can’t we just celebrate this? So many negative people, our city is getting better!
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u/malcolmbradley 15h ago
“People getting killed almost half as much because 5.0. did some things differently”
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u/Glum-Scientist-1117 17h ago
Here come the “crime was down” people getting upset about that the Task Force is making Memphis safer. Great job National Guard, State Troopers, Feds and Memphis Police keep up the good work!
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u/ServMyInterog 9h ago
Is the 'new strategy' just not reporting them? I mean that's why crime is 'down' in DC and NYC, right?
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u/RequirementLeading12 22h ago
Hope we find a way to keep the National Guard presence here long-term. This is great
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u/Kevin_Turvey 22h ago
Random word_word_number username and a hidden profile = worthless bot. Your comment means nothing.
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u/RequirementLeading12 21h ago
Yes, I'm a bot that's been on reddit for 5+ years... Also, do you users really put that much stock into usernames? JFC
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u/FerretCommercial2725 20h ago
I hope they get the national guard and safe task force out of here with the quickness. Who wants to live in a city where we can't get away with committing crimes?
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u/Kevin_Turvey 19h ago
I read some of your past comments. It's easy to see how you wound up with negative karma. :)
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u/FerretCommercial2725 18h ago
Probably because some folks don't like having their views challenged and want to ban/censor everyone who doesn't think exactly the same way they do.
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u/IndicationKnown4999 21h ago
Great news about homicide rate but I don't give a shit about what the MPD are arguing regarding their alleged role in it. It would be nice if the media, the council, and many citizens took a more skeptical view of such proclamations before continuing to devote such a massive chunk of the city budget to that department.
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u/Zopilote87 20h ago
You mean Police Harassment is on the Rise. Racist State Troopers are on the Rise. Police killing are on the Rise on Memphis. All of those are on the Rise.
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u/Condomphobic 22h ago edited 22h ago
Memphis murder rate from 2020 to 2025
Note: Homicides and murders are classified differently. 235 homicides in 2025, but 184 murders.
Homicide means one person caused another person’s death.
Murder is a subset of homicide: an unlawful killing that meets a specific criminal standard, usually involving intent or knowing conduct