Saving Memphis

Inside the federal and state law-enforcement operation turning one of America’s most dangerous cities around

Crime has declined precipitously since the task force began its work, with murders down 29 percent, rapes 33 percent, and robberies 49 percent. (TOBIAS EVERKE/OSTKREUZ ARCHIV/REDUX)

In late 2025, Harvard Kennedy School professor Sandra Susan Smith expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s decision to target a dozen American cities, including Oakland, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, and Washington, D.C., for temporary federal law-enforcement and National Guard deployments aimed at reducing crime and restoring order. Smith wondered “about what the consequences for deploying federalized forces are, especially for black and brown people in the cities that have been targeted for intervention.” She continued: “What seems clear to me is that the costs that are associated with this federal intervention will far outweigh the meager and very short-term benefits.”

With a population just over 610,000, two-thirds of it black, Tennessee’s second-largest metropolis has consistently ranked among the country’s most dangerous places. The Bluff City faces steep challenges. Along with its persistent crime problem, it has struggled with a police recruitment and retention crisis that has left the Memphis Police Department (MPD) roughly 600 officers short of full strength. Compounding those difficulties was the 2023 police encounter that claimed the life of Tyre Nichols, further straining relations between law enforcement and the community. As if this weren’t enough, Shelby County District Attorney Steven Mulroy added further obstacles, pushing various misguided reforms like “restorative justice” and the expansion of juvenile courts to include older defendants up to age 25.

Many would not have expected President Trump to expend much effort helping Memphis, a city with a Democratic mayor, a “progressive” district attorney, and an electorate that gave him only 36 percent of its vote in the 2024 election. But Trump has acted.

In September 2025, a presidential memorandum established the Memphis Safe Task Force (MSTF), now led by the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), advancing a clear objective: “to end street and violent crime in Memphis to the greatest possible extent through the promotion and facilitation of hypervigilant policing, aggressive prosecution, complex investigations, financial enforcement, and large-scale saturation of besieged neighborhoods with law-enforcement personnel, and which shall coordinate closely with State officials in Tennessee and local officials in Memphis to share information, develop joint priorities, and maximize resources to make Memphis safe and restore public order.”

The data suggest success, so far. Between 2020 and 2024, Memphis averaged 288 murders annually, a homicide rate of 47.2 per 100,000; but the city ended 2025 (with the task force operational for the last three months) with 184 murders (30.2 per 100,000, a decline of 36 percent). Through the first quarter of 2026, marking nearly seven months since the task force’s formation, crime in Memphis continued to decline sharply. According to a joint media release issued by the local crime commission and the University of Memphis’s Public Safety Institute, murders over that period were down 29 percent. Rapes fell 33 percent. Robbery was down 49 percent, while aggravated assaults dropped 27 percent. The declines were just as pronounced for major property crimes, including burglary (33 percent) and vehicle theft (66 percent).

This is no small thing. To an unusual degree for U.S. presidents , Trump has prioritized crime throughout his second term with everything from executive orders on policing and bail reform to immigration-enforcement surges and changes to how the Department of Justice approaches police oversight. Trump highlighted the 2025 year-end declines in serious crime in his February State of the Union address , during which he nodded to the MSTF: “Starting last summer, I deployed our National Guard and federal law enforcement to restore law and order to our most dangerous cities, including Memphis, Tennessee, big success.”

The primary beneficiaries of that success are the city’s black residents.

On March 23, Trump visited Memphis to highlight the MSTF’s work. Two weeks before the president’s trip, I flew down to Memphis for an inside look at the task force and the work its members are doing to turn the city around. Both the U.S. Attorney and the U.S. Marshal for the Western District of Tennessee, D. Michael Dunavant and Tyreece L. Miller , sat for exclusive interviews and arranged a nighttime ride-along with one of the task force’s “flex” teams, roving enforcement units deployed to crime hot spots as needed. I witnessed one night’s work in what may become one of the greatest urban turnarounds in decades.

The first thing to know about the MSTF is that those running it are expected to produce results. It is a genuine crime-fighting operation, not political theater.

On a warm, overcast morning in his office on the eighth floor of the Odell Horton Federal Building, U.S. Attorney Dunavant explained how the MSTF differs from previous efforts. “We’ve done operations in Memphis before . . . 30-day, 60-day, 90-day operations that have had some short-term impact.” “But,” he continued, “[the president] has made it clear that this is a long-term operation that will continue until violent crime is reduced in a meaningful way, once and for all.” Dunavant lamented that punishment has become a “dirty word” for critics of the American criminal-justice system. Regardless, aggressively targeting criminals, and doing so at scale, is precisely what the MSTF is designed to do.

Thirty-three federal and state agencies contribute personnel to the MSTF. When I visited in March, it comprised more than 2,600 operational personnel. The task force deploys 42 interagency teams across the city’s nine precincts, carrying out missions that range from hot-spot policing and follow-ups on service calls to executing search warrants and, unsurprisingly, given that the MSTF is led by the United States Marshals Service, tracking down and apprehending fugitives. As Marshal Miller put it, “This operation is the Marshals Service doing what we do on steroids.”

Deploying that many agents means pulling personnel from around the country away from their families and normal duties at their home agencies, including ICE, CBP, ATF, FBI, HSI, DEA, the USMS, and even the IRS. Agents are flown in and housed in local hotels for the duration of their two-week tours. Some of the agents I spoke with were visiting Memphis for the first time on MSTF assignments; others were on their third tour in the city. Many rent cars for their work because doing so is cheaper than transporting agency vehicles from around the country. The entire operation is a major logistical undertaking.

Outsiders though they may be, the agents adapt quickly. While police work is broadly similar across jurisdictions, it helps to have a native’s sense of the local context, and that’s where the visiting agents’ local counterparts come in. Each of the task force’s 42 teams includes at least one member from either the MPD or the Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP). I was told that what local authorities bring to the operation is invaluable. On the street, they play critical roles, including conducting traffic stops, federal agents lack jurisdiction to enforce local traffic laws, during which teams often uncover contraband such as guns and drugs, as well as outstanding warrants.

The MPD and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation share intelligence with task-force leaders, helping identify crime hot spots and prioritizing high-risk offenders and criminal organizations. At the MSTF’s temporary headquarters, I was ushered into a large room buzzing with activity. Liaisons from participating agencies fielded calls from agents in the field, either reporting arrests or receiving critical information in real time. One wall was lined with oversize screens displaying mug shots and criminal histories of targets identified for warrant-service teams, evidence photos from recent busts, and live maps tracking patterns of criminal activity across the city.

The visiting agents were appreciative of, and, in some cases, surprised by, the warm welcome they received from state and city authorities. Out in the field, the relationship between the federal and local members of the task force could fairly be described as brotherly and cooperative. That degree of coordination is notable, given the long-standing turf battles and institutional tensions that often characterize relationships between federal and local law-enforcement agencies. Agents regularly sought local officers’ input and offered assistance wherever they could.

During one “knock-and-talk”, visiting an address associated with a wanted offender to see whether he was there or to ask where he might be found, an MPD officer got a hit on his license-plate reader from a U-Haul trailer parked in a driveway near the house our team was targeting. The trailer had been reported stolen. The task-force members were there to apprehend a violent felon, but, recognizing that the MPD still had its own job to do, they offered to leave an agent behind with the officer before moving on to the next target so that he would not have to wait alone for backup. There was not even a hint of condescension or tension between the federal agents and the local officers.

Even more important, the local officers’ appreciation for their federal counterparts is shared by the community. Unlike the videos that so many Americans saw coming out of cities like Minneapolis, where federal agents were regularly heckled, taunted, and attacked, the response from Memphians has been overwhelmingly positive. Many of the agents I spoke with, some of whom did immigration-enforcement tours in Minneapolis, recounted being thanked by strangers in the street. For them, Memphis was a breath of fresh air.

The teamwork extends beyond local law enforcement. Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, “has been good to work with,” Miller says. He describes a collaborative relationship that enables the task force to operate without the official hostility that other federal operations have encountered in places like Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York City. Less surprising, but equally important, has been the support of Governor Bill Lee, who approved the deployment of the Tennessee National Guard to play a key role in the MSTF.

The task-force members may owe their warm reception from both residents and local officers to the fact that Memphians understand the dangers of the work they are doing. Those dangers cannot be understated. The night before I arrived in Memphis, members of the same flex team with whom I went on the ride-along were shot at while responding to a separate call for shots fired. No one was hit, luckily. A few days earlier, though, an MPD officer was shot at point-blank range during a traffic stop. Thankfully, he survived.

Undeterred by these recent close calls, the team I rode with gathered in the parking lot of an abandoned strip mall to plan its next operation. The target: an active Vice Lords gang member with an outstanding warrant, and not just any Vice Lord but one with a prior murder-for-hire conviction. Casual conversation in the parking lot stopped when the lead agent called everyone to attention. Once it was time to work, the smiles disappeared, and you could feel the shift in the agents’ focus.

The team was briefed on the target, warned about the risk of violent resistance, and walked through every step of the operation, from the direction of approach and where vehicles would park to the precise role of each agent: who would take the front door, who would monitor the back of the house, who would cover the windows, and what supplies the medic should have on hand. The TH