In case you missed the memo, Memphis, Tennessee, one of the Left’s many crime capitals, is getting a deployment of National Guardsmen to help with the out-of-control criminal element. Memphis, if you forgot, is where five brown cops beat brown Tyre Nichols to death in 2023. In 2024, the two-toned Biden Administration declared that the Memphis PD was racist toward blacks.
My response.
Memphis, the home of the blues, is a Black majority city run by blacks with a black-on-black crime problem, … not because of black people but because of Democrat people.
It wasn’t racism, it was Democrats, and it still is. It is a problem the National Guard can’t fix, so any actual improvement post-deployment is at best temporary, unless the citizens decide that their brief brush with public safety and clean streets – assuming a similar outcome as that in DC and there are no guarantees – is something they’d like more of and that translates into electoral action that changes the guard for when after The Guard leaves..
By Whose Numbers
If you search National Guard and Memphis, the totally unbiased search engines and AI will pillory you with links about how crime is at a 25-year low. Not everyone agrees, and it is likely because, like many a Democrat war zone, the secret to lower crime is not to report it.
CrimeRate.org isn’t impressed with the state of Memphis.
That’s a lot of red, and it doesn’t mean Republican.
Is Memphis, TN Safe?
The F grade indicates that the rate of crime is much higher than that of the average US city. Memphis ranks in the 4th percentile for safety, meaning it is safer than 4% of cities but less safe than 96%. This analysis applies only to the Memphis area’s official city boundaries. See the table below for nearby cities.
The crime rate in the Memphis area is 65.28 per 1,000 residents in the typical year. the Memphis area Residents generally consider the southeast part of the city to be the safest. Your chance of being a victim of crime in the Memphis area varies by neighborhood – ranging from 1 in 7 in the west neighborhoods to 1 in 40 in the southeast.
When looking at total crime counts (rather than per capita rates), the central parts of Memphis, TN see the most incidents – about 23,392 per year. In contrast, the southeast part of the city has the fewest, with approximately 3,904 crimes annually.
No need to guess why this is the home of the blues, but there are signs that some have hope. Business owners, restaurateurs, are already offering free meals to National Guardsmen expected to deploy to the city in the coming days or weeks.
While the timeline is still unclear, restaurants around Memphis are welcoming the National Guard with open arms.
The Rum Boogie Café posted on Facebook “We will be providing a complementary pulled pork sandwich with a side.”
Mortimers posted something similar, saying “We will be offering a free lunch plate.”
The restaurant posted on Facebook welcoming the National Guard to town.
Another spot that was one of the first ones to post was Elwood’s Shack and their manager said they felt like it was the right thing to do.
“It is just a way to get people more involved, and they are going to be here anyway,” Mandy Edwards said.
She said since they made the post over the weekend a lot of customers have come in supporting it.
“They love it, I think supporting people who do what they do for the country it always a good thing,” Edwards said.
These are the people who live with the crime, absent the politics. They, their customers, and the workers all know the score. It is why they may not walk the streets at night or alone, have to avoid poop, needles, and homeless camps, are victims of crime, or know people who were. You know, ‘Memphis.’
And maybe crime has improved, but I’d bet that if someone were to DOGE the Memphis PD, you’d find some fudging around the edges at the behest of the politicians to whom they answer. The other issue, and this is revealed by the quoted response above, is that claiming crime is down doesn’t mean your city is safe. It’s like making the case for how good things are because the guy who punches you in the face every day missed a day.
In 2023, crime in Memphis was higher than in 99.7% of all US cities. 2023 was the year Tyre Nichols was beaten to death by individuals from the MPD SCORPION Unit, some of whom were hired off the street and fast-tracked to fill gaps created by Democrats’ bowing to the 2020/2021 BLM defund movement.
Memphis wasn’t a safe city, and it isn’t now, and the people who live and work there know this.
How Safe was it in 2000?
Twenty-five years ago, in 2000 AD, Memphis reported 149 murders, 547 rapes, 4,087 armed robberies, and 4,808 assaults. There were 14,943 Burglaries, 26,365 reports of larceny theft, and 8,696 vehicle thefts.
In 2024, the last full year with at least somewhat reliable data, Memphis was still the most violent city in America.
It consistently has three times as much crime as the State of Tennessee and more than six times the US average.
Even if crime is “down,” in 2025, it’s not anywhere near the rest of the nation, and while I’m no fan of federal deployments for domestic crime fighting, Democrats have no reason to complain. They’ve been wanting a federal police force for years. They love the idea because you can run a despotism without one, which at least explains their hyperbolic ranting about Trump’s fascism. The issue, however, as with everything else, is not the deployment of “federally directed troops,” but that they are not in control.
Oh, and Democrats want crime. Every policy they advance encourages it. Defund the police. Allow crimes to occur. Refuse to prosecute. No or low bail, even for repeat offenders. Encouraging third-world countries to empty their prisons into America and escorting them deep into the homeland, then defending them to keep them in the country.
Peace and public safety are not planks in the Democrat Party platform, and don’t let them, or anyone else, tell you otherwise. They objected to the DC deployment for the same reason they will bus protesters into Memphis to object to the next one. Dems are pro-crime and chaos, and minority voters are beginning to realize that. If Republicans show them there is another way, it could deal a severe blow to their political future, especially if crime goes back up when they leave it all in the hands of the democrats, mostly minorities, who let it get that way in the first place, with one final, necessary observation.
The culture will determine if they stick the landing post “surge.” The police show up to deal with a crime committed or in progress. And while the presence of officers can delay or prevent crime, that’s not their job. It is to investigate. To educate about the circumstances or situations where crime can happen. The people of Memphis have to want it to keep it. It’s your city. They work for you.
