In late February, Memphis Mayor Paul Young told an audience at a local panel discussion that he had sat down in person with the city’s gang leaders shortly before Valentine’s Day and asked them for a ceasefire. Young said the gang leaders agreed, as long as certain conditions were met.
It was a rare and creative attempt to curb Memphis’s growing and troubling increase in homicides and gun violence.
In fact, by February, Memphis, Tennessee, had already recorded forty-five homicides, compared to thirty-eight in the same time frame last year, according to data that the Memphis Police Public Information Office emailed to The Progressive. Memphis also recorded 399 homicides in 2023, 346 in 2021, and 261 homicides in 2022.
But in 2023, the murder rate went down in most American cities. Homicides across the country dropped by about 13 percent when compared to 2022. Chicago, for example, had 617 homicides in 2023 compared to 709 in 2022. And New York City experienced 386 homicides last year, a nearly 12 percent reduction from 2022.
“We’re kind of looking at a return to where we were pre-pandemic,” Alex Piquero, a University of Miami criminology professor, recently told CNN, referring to the spike in homicides and gun violence across the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.
So why have homicides and gun violence recently increased in Memphis even though most U.S. cities have decreased? The answer is complicated.
“Memphis has had issues with gun violence for decades,” Martavius Hampton, a health sciences professor at the University of Memphis, tells The Progressive. According to Hampton, poverty is a major reason.
Elena Delavega, a professor of social work at the University of Memphis, who writes an annual report on poverty in Memphis, says that “right now, the overall poverty rate [in Memphis] is 21.4 percent . . . . The national poverty rate is 12.6 percent.”
“We also have inequality, and the inequality breeds anger and discontent,” Delavega adds. “Inequality leads to a profound sense of injustice, and this sense of injustice is what leads to lashing out in anger.”
Memphis gang leaders themselves listed addressing poverty and unemployment as one of their conditions for a ceasefire during their sit down with Young in mid-February. Assurances that all gangs agree to the ceasefire was another condition. “‘Well, you know, our young guys, they need money,’” Young said, paraphrasing the gang leaders. “‘They need money in their pockets. That’s the way you can change it.’”
“They said, ‘We don’t have programs at our community centers,’” Young added. “‘We don’t have things to do, so we go out and we steal cars, and we ride around with our friends.’”
More than 45,000 young adults in Memphis, aged sixteen to twenty-four, are unemployed and out of school, according to The Collective Blueprint, a nonprofit organization in the city that helps youth and young adults find a successful career.
Hampton says that another contribution to Memphis’s high homicide rate is Tennessee’s new concealed carry law, which took effect in July 2021 and allows adults to carry concealed handguns without a permit.
The deadly March 2023 mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville drew protests and political fights in the Tennessee General Assembly. Shortly after the shooting, Republican Governor Bill Lee, who approved the state’s open carry law in 2021, signed an executive order to strengthen background checks, drawing criticism from gun rights activists.
Tennessee Democratic legislators filed multiple gun reform bills in January 2024, but there doesn’t yet appear to be any draft laws in the works to specifically reintroduce a required concealed carry permit. In any event, no real reform, whether introduced or not, stands much of a chance in the Republican-controlled legislature. “People can now carry guns in various settings . . . so the increase of violence is more likely.” Hampton says.
Hampton highlights other possible factors for Memphis’s homicide rate, including a “cycle of violence,” whereby gun violence is so often witnessed and, therefore, normalized and replicated. He says that the police killing of Tyre Nichols in January 2023 “might have had some type of impact on [the homicide rate], but I think the other factors I mentioned before play a larger role.”
Both professors acknowledged the impossibility of knowing what will happen in the short-term future, but neither expressed much optimism.
In the next year or two, Hampton says, the homicide rate “will probably be around the same number, or slightly go up or down.”
“I would say it’s not going to get any better,” Delavega adds, citing a lack of policies and legislation on the horizon that may address poverty, inequality, and “sensible” gun regulation. “It might get worse.”