“Memphis has the worst crime rate in the country.”
The sentence has been echoed by officials ranging from the president to local representatives and the media as the National Guard and a flood of other federal agencies have begun flooding Memphis in an attempt to curb crime.
Meanwhile, local officials note that overall crime is the lowest it has been in 25 years. While this is technically accurate, the city of Memphis records crimes based on incidents. This means that five car burglaries that occurred on the same lot, at around the same time, are usually recorded as a single incident, as police believe the same suspect carried them all out.
However, the FBI and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation track crime differently. Instead of tracking incidents, FBI and TBI data looks at victims. The FBI and TBI data would show the scenario described above as five car thefts, since there were five cases of one car being stolen.
Both are accurate representations of crime and can paint a clearer picture of crime in Memphis when used together, but the FBI and TBI data are where crime is most easily compared across cities and states.
So does Memphis really have the worst crime rate in the country?
Comparing crime rates is a complicated business
Looking at the 8,987 city agencies that submitted data to the FBI last year, Memphis did not rank in the top 50 for its overall crime rate in 2024. According to the FBI’s own data, Memphis found itself at No. 57 on that overall crime rate list. The city with the worst reported crime rate in 2024 was Lakeside, Colorado.
And therein lies the problem with overall crime rates.
Lakeside had an estimated population of 16 people in 2024. The FBI tracks eight major crimes when accounting for overall crime: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, robbery, larceny and theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. Lakeview reported 228 crimes of that nature in 2024.
Memphis, on the other hand, reported a total of 57,643 crimes that fell into those categories.
To account for this, the FBI will divide cities into specific groups based on their population size. In the past, the first group included the most populous cities in the United States, defined as those with a population of more than 250,000 people. I would also divide it into three subsets of 1,000,000 people or more, a population between 500,000 and 999,999, and a population between 250,000 and 499,999.
For the purposes of this article, The Commercial Appeal compared the 40 most populous cities and metropolitan areas in the United States, based on 2024 population estimates. The list includes some of the most populous cities in the country, including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston, as well as cities closest to the population of Memphis, including Detroit, Portland, Oregon, and El Paso, Texas.
Memphis, despite ranking 29th in estimated population, had the highest overall crime rate, the highest violent crime rate, and the highest property crime rate of any city on the list. And the margin was wide.
In 2024, FBI data showed that Memphis had an overall crime rate of 9,400 crimes per 100,000 residents. Portland had the second highest overall crime rate with 6,246 crimes per 100,000 residents.
The large gap between Memphis and the other cities continued in the city’s violent and property crime rates in 2024. Last year, Memphis reported 2,501 violent crimes per 100,000 people and 6,899 property crimes per 100,000 people.
Detroit had the second-highest violent crime rate last year, with 1,781 crimes per 100,000 residents. For property crimes, Portland ranked second with 5,526 crimes per 100,000 residents.
What does that look like in real life?
It can be difficult to contextualize 100,000 people, which is the number commonly used to show crime rates in large cities. So to imagine what these crime rates are like, we’ll use the FedExForum to its maximum capacity.
Both the University of Memphis athletics department website and Flintco, LLC, the company that consulted on the construction of FedExForum, cite 18,400 as the stadium’s seating capacity.
If the stadium had that capacity for a basketball game, a crime would have been committed against 1,730 (about 9%) of those in attendance, based on Memphis’ overall crime rate. Crimes were allegedly committed against 1,149 (about 6%) people according to Portland’s crime rate.
Los Angeles and Mesa, Arizona, were at the bottom of the list in terms of overall crime rates. Using the FedExForum at full capacity as we did above, 407 (about 2%) people would be victims of a crime in Los Angeles and 358 (1.9%) people would be victims of a crime in Mesa.
However, this does not mean that Memphis had a higher raw number of crimes committed in 2024. Memphis had the seventh-highest number of crimes committed in 2024, according to FBI data, with 57,643 total crimes. New York City (252,239 crimes), Houston (126,200 crimes), and Chicago (105,871 crimes) were the top three cities in raw crime statistics last year, but with lower overall crime rates than Memphis due to much larger populations.
The trend continued with murders and non-negligent manslaughters in Memphis. Earlier this year, FBI Director Kash Patel called Memphis the “homicide capital” of the United States in homicides per capita. According to 2024 data, he was right.
Memphis topped the list with 40.6 homicides per 100,000 residents. Baltimore was second with 34.8 homicides per 100,000 people and Detroit was third with 31.2 homicides per 100,000 people.
However, similar to overall crime rates, Memphis did not top that list when it came to raw homicide numbers. Chicago reported the most homicides last year, with 461, according to FBI data. New York City (325) and Houston (320) were the next two on the list. Memphis ranked sixth with 249 homicides in 2024.
Despite topping this list in several categories, crime in Memphis has decreased. TBI provides a broader list of reported crimes, which showed an 11% decrease in serious crimes. That decline was driven by a 20% decline in property crimes, even as violent crimes increased 0.5% compared to 2023.
Memphis outpaced the nationwide decline in property crime, which the FBI says fell 8.1% between 2023 and 2024. But Memphis didn’t follow the same trend with violent crime. The FBI reported a nationwide decline in violent crime of 4.5% between 2023 and 2024.
Lucas Finton covers crime, police, prisons, courts and criminal justice policy for The Commercial Appeal. You can reach him by phone or email: (901)208-3922 and Lucas.Finton@commercialappeal.com, and follow him at X @LucasFinton.
This article originally appeared in the Memphis Commercial Appeal: How Does Memphis’ Crime Rate Compare to Other U.S. Cities?