“IT was tense. Everybody was on their guard, head on a swivel. There were car thefts, carjackings, shoplifting raids.
“Ladies especially were afraid — to just go pump gas, afraid to go shopping, afraid to go out to dinner because, when you’d come out to the parking lot, your window was going to be broken into.”
Josh Hammond was talking as he showed me a damaged pillar inside his high-end off-licence in downtown Memphis, where a truck was driven through the front windows by a gang of raiders.
Josh added: “You’d walk around the city and, in any parking lot there was broken glass from these ram raids.
“In 2023, there were 200 liquor store burglaries — we were number 45.”
Describing the hit on his shop, he said: “There were maybe five or six [raiders] — they rammed a truck through these beautiful windows we have. It caused about $30,000 of damage, and they took off with about $20,000 of stock.”
His popular store, Busters, has been family-run for three generations — and is famed in Memphis for selling pretty much every tipple imaginable.
But the shop has now been the target of several raids — reflecting a violent crime epidemic in the city that has turned this birthplace of rock ’n’ roll into the gang capital of the American South.
The home of Elvis’s mansion Graceland has become a byword for gun violence. An underfunded and overwhelmed law-and-order machine often detains criminals only to release them on to the street within hours, to re-offend.
Leslie Taylor, a fed-up mum who founded the Memphis Crime Beat volunteer group, paints a dark picture.
She said of the troubles that inspired her community work: “In my neighbourhood, hearing gunshots was a regular occurrence. Hearing people drag-racing was a regular occurrence. It was not uncommon for people to be pulled over on our highways because they were hanging out car windows, shooting automatic weapons.”
Meanwhile Josh Hammond — faced with both insurance companies and customers abandoning his business out of fear — resorted to paying out for full-time security and installing bollards around his shop — but just two years later he has let the heavies go.
In September 2025, the US Government flooded Memphis with more than 1,200 National Guard troops, US Marshals and FBI agents as part of the new Memphis Safe Task Force.
“Memphis is deeply troubled,” said Donald Trump, announcing the task force.
“For years, our leaders allowed entire cities in America to be destroyed by crime, drugs and gang violence.
“Tolerating this violence was always a choice.”
Although political opponents howled, the statistics speak for themselves.
Both the White House and the independent Memphis Crime Commission have separate data showing overall crime has fallen by more than a third — back to levels last seen in 2011.
Murder is down more than 36 per cent, and burglaries are down by a quarter. Two of the thugs who smashed up Busters are now serving double-digit jail terms.
“There’s no question things are so much safer,” Hammond tells me.
“I can’t speak for everybody, but for the things that I see in my business, my family, the neighbourhoods we’re in, things have definitely changed, and I hope that’s the case throughout the city.”
So, while Trump faces a pasting in Tuesday’s Midterm elections, what are the potential political gains for him of his policy win in Memphis?
“Without question, the numbers work, and the task force has been a godsend,” says John Covington, vice president of the Memphis Police Association which represents the city’s 1,900 boys and girls in blue.
While local Democrat politicians and party activists branded sending in the troops “fascism”, the officer welcomed the National Guard’s arrival.
He said: “They’re out there on the streets — it’s visibility, reporting, deterring, support for us. But when you arrest people, you’ve got to follow through with the cases and put people in jail — the FBI has been huge with that.”
“Bringing in some federal prosecutions, too, we’re seeing people being put away for a long time. The really, really dangerous, violent people — we were able to put them away for years, so it’s been huge.”
Covington adds that his force is 600 short of its 2,500-officer recruitment target, so it has hugely benefitted from the back-up. He said: “It’s just all this extra manpower, it basically has made us fully staffed.
“We thought we would never see low crime again, and here we are. It’s amazing.”
Despite the results, the task force remains highly controversial — mostly because it has the name Donald J Trump attached to it.
Yet Covington is scathing about the criticism it has faced.
He said: “If you ask the progressive radicals, the liberal politicians, it’s been terrible. It’s been ‘fascist’. They find a way to ignore the numbers.
“But if you talk to the people, to law enforcement, they will tell you the real story — that it has had a huge impact. People are able to take their kids out to parks, and not hear gunfire at night and not fear bullets coming through their windows.”
Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District covers Memphis and is the Democrats’ only House of Representatives seat in the whole state.
Yet, thanks to the task force, and some boundary changes, it is one of a tiny handful of seats the Republicans could gain on Tuesday — which is expected to be a very tough night for Trump.
While he was re-elected in 2024 on a hardline platform of fighting immigration and crime, the cost of living and war in Iran have overshadowed clear successes on those fronts.
But regardless of the politics, there are huge lessons for all major cities from the Memphis story: officer numbers, and proper deterrents, work.
As happy copper Covington says: “It’s not rocket science.”