The Memphis Police Department is struggling to meet staffing and 911 response goals at the same time it grapples with record homicide rates, all amid a nationwide law enforcement staffing shortage.

MPD is staffed with 1,912 commissioned officers, falling nearly 400 officers behind a goal of 2,300 set by Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis. The current level is also 600 officers fewer than a 2,500 goal set by the Memphis City Council. 

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The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated MPD’s staffing shortages, but the city’s problem goes as far back as 2014, when pension and insurance benefits for officers were cut.

“We lost somewhere between 400 to 500 officers (when these benefits were cut),” said John Covington, chief steward of Memphis Police Association. “So we were already depleted. … Now, the nation is seeing this shortage. So we kind of get the double whammy. We already started off behind.”

The goal of employing 2,500 commissioned officers has not been met since 2011, when the city experienced its lowest crime rate, according to Bill Gibbons, president of the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission. 

Since then, the number of staff has only declined. By 2021, MPD had 1,955 officers, violent crimes rose 53% from 2012 and a record 345 homicides occurred.

Retention has been a huge challenge. According to MPA, in 2021, 81% of MPD officers who resigned had four years or less on the job.

To tackle these issues, the city, MPD and partners have been taking “data-driven” measures to restore benefits and introduce raises, bonuses and incentives. The state also recently passed a ban on residency requirements that previously prevented officers from living outside the jurisdictions they patrolled. 

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The hope is that these will serve as “tools in the toolbox” that, when put together, will put the city “in a position to make some real progress,” Gibbons said.

Of MPD’s 1,912 commissioned officers, 1,173 officers and supervisors are on patrol, working at nine precincts across the city.

Asked how MPD deploys its staff to each division, officials would not disclose specifics. But Sgt. Louis Brownlee, public information officer for MPD, said the remaining 739 officers “are working in various capacities in different units across the department.”

Officers are deployed as needed, but the bulk of police officers are “on proactive routine patrols, answering calls for service across each precinct,” Brownlee added. “Additionally, each station has task force officers who work in a concentrated effort to reduce crime at each station.”

The department’s website does provide some information regarding the number of staff for a few of its units. 

• A traffic and special operations division in the Austin Peay precinct has a Motorcycle Squad, Special Traffic Investigation Squad (STIS) and DUI unit. In all, the STIS has 22 sergeants, four lieutenants, two majors and one acting Lt. Colonel. The Motorcycle Unit has 13 patrolmen and two lieutenants. And the DUI Unit has 22 patrolmen and three lieutenants.
• In MPD’s special services division, its Officers in the Schools (OIS) program deploys officers to 22 high schools and three middle schools. 
• MPD’s mounted patrol team, often seen Downtown, has 10 mounts, including a lieutenant, a sergeant, five patrolmen, one reserve patrolman and two additional auxiliary officers. This team handles community details, works patrol assignments, attends training sessions and initiates specials.

911 responses

A performance dashboard on the city’s data hub site shows that MPD is slightly behind its goal of answering 95% of its 911 calls within 20 seconds. 

It is close to its goal at 93.36%, answering approximately 3,500 calls daily and showing progress from January, when the 911 response rate within 20 seconds fell as far behind at 83.58%. But even then, the department showed improvement from its lowest point in 2015 when the response rate dipped to 33.5%. 

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Brownlee said the department believes additional staffing will aid it in reaching its “self-imposed” target of 95% calls answered within 20 seconds.

Currently, 911 dispatchers give calls to officers based on priority. Higher priority calls, such as murders or violent crimes that are actively taking place, take precedence over lower priority calls, such as business burglaries that already happened or that involved no injuries. 

MPD said it will continue to try to obtain new staff that will fill vacancies and help “meet and exceed” 911 answer goals. The department also said it will prioritize adding more staff to uniformed patrol at its nine precincts in Memphis. 

Getting more officers

According to the Crime Commission, a 2021 Deloitte study noted that 90% of overtime pay was being spent to meet minimum staffing levels to respond to calls for service.

A recent review of CIP and general funds for fiscal year 2022 during a City Council committee meeting in March indicated that MPD was up to $15,344,136 in overtime costs, a 15% increase from March last year. 

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The Deloitte report recommended several steps for MPD to better utilize commissioned officer resources, such as moving from an “equitable distribution model” of personnel precincts to “an optimized model using workload demand.” This means MPD should deploy officers as needed rather than equally across each precinct or unit.

The Deloitte study noted there was a 23% decline in applications for MPD officer positions and a 54% drop in new hires in 2020 compared to 2019.

The department has 45 new hires in training. An additional training class of about 72 recruits will graduate in July. 

“Of course, not all 72 will graduate,” Gibbons said. “I’d say 60 will graduate.”

During a recent Germantown Area Chamber of Commerce meeting, Davis told business leaders that 90 more will train in June.

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In addition to the reduced benefits, the pandemic and the upheaval that occurred shortly afterward, the department’s low complement could be attributed to a number of reasons, including: 

• Officers, who were part of a large, national hiring initiative in the 1990s, are now beginning to retire.
• Under former Memphis Mayor A C Wharton’s administration, the city cut the police budget and initiated a hiring freeze, causing concerns from then-police director Toney Armstrong that the department would become “grossly” understaffed and would require “hiring frenzies” in the future.

Thinking of ways to increase MPD’s staff complement has been a team effort between the city, MPD, local organizations and the state. 

The Tennessee residency law passed by the General Assembly during the recently completed session imposes a ban on police residency requirements. That will allow officers to live outside Shelby County and therefore widen the hiring pool. Both Mayor Jim Strickland and Davis have expressed support for the law.

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“It basically places Memphis on a more level playing field with cities that we are in competition with for hiring police officers,” Gibbons said. “For example, Nashville does not have a residency requirement. So I think it’s going to help. It’s not the sole solution. But it’s an additional tool in the toolbox.”

The Crime Commission plans on monitoring how effective lifting residency requirements is and how many officers living outside the city’s limits are hired.

“What we want to do is, as we move forward, is find out how many MPD recruits and Sheriff’s Office recruits, or individuals, who are applying live in the surrounding area, whether it be Fayette County, Tennessee or DeSoto County, Mississippi, or Crittenden County, Arkansas,” Gibbons said. “But we want to really monitor that as we move forward.”

Pension and pay

According to MPA, the residency requirements ranked directly behind pension and pay regarding MPD officers’ decision to leave or stay in the department. 

In a recent opinion piece Covington wrote for The Daily Memphian, MPD once offered the highest pay for law enforcement officers in Shelby County and often drew in officers from other agencies. 

But MPD now falls far behind, with an average $61,343 salary for an area patrolman, which is about $5,000 behind the salary for a Germantown patrolman and $4,000 behind an SCSO officer. 

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Yet Memphis police officers are much busier, having taken nearly a million calls in 2019, while Shelby County Sheriff’s deputies took 86,617 and Germantown officers took 40,177.

In April, Strickland proposed a 10% raise for officers over the next two fiscal years to the City Council, which will put MPD back on the map, Covington said. 

“By the second year, that will catapult us to number one,” Covington said. “It took this kind of surge to get us back in the game, so to speak. So we’ll actually be competitive for that number one spot.”

Another big step in the right direction toward addressing the low retention rate, he said, was when a 2019 referendum was passed by Memphis voters, restoring pension and insurance benefits for officers who retired before the age of 65. 

‘Fresh eyes’

Davis, who was sworn in as MPD chief in June 2021, came into the department with “fresh eyes” to implement ideas, Covington added.

These ideas include shortening the time it takes to drop a prisoner off at the jail and get them processed as well as implementing a Police Service Technician (PST) program that utilizes non-commissioned personnel to handle such calls as minor traffic accidents so commissioned officers can focus on high priority calls such as violent crimes. 

Other initiatives to increase staffing have included speeding up the hiring process, instituting a $15,000 sign-on bonus, and relocation reimbursement and down payment assistance for officers relocating from other municipalities. 

And thanks in part to $6.1 million in private sector funding through the Crime Commission, MPD now offers a retention incentive of 9% per year to officers who stay on the force for up to five years and a $5,000 referral bonus for officers who refer candidates. Of those eligible for retention bonuses, 90% signed up. 

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Memphis-Shelby County Schools, along with MPA and the Crime Commission, are thinking of ways to ensure the success of the department for years to come. Part of that includes attracting youth to law enforcement, such as through a possible public safety academy for high school students to learn about becoming police officers, firefighters, prosecutors and public defenders. 

“The hope is … that four years, five years, 10 years down the road, we’ve created a police department that is truly uniquely Memphis, that it kind of came out of the schools with mentors in the community,” Covington said. “I think this kind of shortage has created opportunities to stop and think about things more long term. And how do we address this problem? Not just trying to staunch the league, but really looking at larger, long-term solutions.”