Related ...
... A federal surge cut Memphis crime, but a one-year review shows a complex reality: prior local wins, added resources, and claims of racial profiling.
As temperatures inched into the 90s last October, the military marched into Memphis.
Ordered into the city by the Trump administration, federal and state law enforcement agencies joined local officers to form the Memphis Safe Task Force, a multiagency operation that, by early 2026, had grown to more than 2,600 personnel and 42 teams across the city.
But unlike in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Chicago, where federal enforcement efforts had met resistance from local officials, Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, said he would support the mission and urged the task force to focus on violent crime rather than immigration enforcement. The city was still struggling with crime and was short hundreds of police officers.
Now, at the end of its first year, the combined task force has made some 13,140 arrests and seized 2,201 illegal firearms, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.
The Trump administration argues that those numbers prove its approach to public safety works -- and that Democratic policies in cities like Memphis don't. Yet the Memphis, Tennessee, experiment offers a more complicated picture.
During the task force's first year, murders were down 37%, sexual assaults 30%, and robberies 47%, compared with a year earlier, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. Serious crime overall was down nearly 38%.
But the decline in crime was already underway well before the task force arrived. The Memphis Police Department had begun chipping away at a backlog of cold cases as early as 2023, even as the department struggled with low staffing. Its Operation HUSH, which ran from January 2023 through June 2025, had already produced 45 indictments, according to the MPD.
Murder rates already falling
Between 2023 and 2024, Memphis homicides fell from a peak of 399 to 301. The decline continued in 2025, when the MPD reported 235 murders, the city's lowest annual total since the pandemic.
Trump administration officials have highlighted the decline as evidence of the task force's effectiveness, though the downward trend had begun before its deployment. ...
