After four killings and a revealing autopsy, Memphis is fed up with the national guard takeover

National guard troops began walking the streets of Memphis a year ago this week, as part of a federal surge of law enforcement agents sent into the city at the behest of the Trump administration to reduce violent crime.

Fewer soldiers are on the street today, as the city’s grudging initial acceptance of the president’s deployment has given way to doubts about their effectiveness, focus and respect for civil rights – particularly after four men were killed in gunfire by federal agents working with the taskforce, with a recent autopsy showing that one was shot in the back.

Donald Trump signed an executive order last September directing a surge of federal law enforcement agents from the ATF, FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other agencies into Memphis. A month later, Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, paired that with additional state patrol officers and the activation of 1,500 Tennessee national guard members to patrol the streets of downtown Memphis.

The Memphis Safe Task Force claims credit for deep reductions in the violent crime rate. And while the city is on track for the lowest rate of homicides in decades, independent analysis argues the deployment of the national guard has had no statistically measurable impact on violent crime and that violence would have fallen in Memphis much like it has across the country in cities without similar interventions.

Memphis’s headline-driving homicide rate has fallen about 35% since the start of the taskforce. Murders in the city’s second quarter decreased by 60% year over year, according to reports from the Memphis police department.

But Memphis had a 26% decrease from 249 murders reported in 2024 to 184 in 2025, before the taskforce was deployed. A year to the day from the start of the Memphis Safe Task Force, Memphis reported 96 murders, compared with 149 the previous year. The city is on pace for 135 murders for 2026, a rate of about 22.2 per 100,000 residents.

“The taskforce has been very successful and we appreciate the work the Tennessee national guard has done in helping us reduce crime,” said Brady McCarron, a United States Marshals Service spokeperson who fields media requests for the taskforce. “Overall crime in Memphis is down significantly, dropping nearly 36% year-to-date in 2026 compared to the previous year, according to Memphis police department’s own statistics.”

A report by the Center for American Progress, a Washington DC-based thinktank, however, picked apart claims that large reductions in violence could be attributed to national guard patrols in New Orleans, Memphis and Washington DC, where the presence of troops on the tourist-heavy National Mall and the streets around the White House have become ubiquitous.

Trump reacted to the center’s report by threatening a personal defamation lawsuit against the authors for $5bn unless they retracted the report and issued an apology.

Describing the deployments as a “political charade”, the CAP report used statistical regression to measure changes in violent crime against historical patterns and the double-digit drops in crime in other large cities.

“The findings of this analysis confirm what many already suspected: At the time of the administration’s federal law enforcement and National Guard deployments, the primary goal was never to stop crime,” the report said. “Despite multiple tests using multiple data sources, measures, and windows of time, there is no compelling evidence that these deployments reduced homicides, violent crime, or gun violence.”

In Memphis, a brief initial decrease in violence when national guard troops began patrolling was actually followed by a brief increase in violent crime. The rate eventually smoothed out as crime continued to fall overall, both in Memphis and across the country.

Fewer national guard troops are patrolling the streets of downtown Memphis today.

The taskforce attributes that to a unit rotation. But the pullback also coincides with an autopsy report released by the family of Tyrin Johnson, who was shot dead by two national guard soldiers on Fourth of July weekend.

The taskforce said they were chasing an armed robbery suspect. The autopsy said Johnson was shot in the back.

“The timing is suspicious,” said community organizer Lucci Chambless, who has been in close contact with the Johnson family following the shooting.

The Tennessee national guard and the governor’s office have not yet responded to requests for comment.

Public sentiment in Memphis began to shift after the shooting. Tamboli’s, a pizza place in midtown Memphis, went viral for refusing to seat national guard troops in protest of the deployment. A call by conservatives to boycott the restaurant instead packed it with supporters. More than 50 other businesses have signed on to a “buy-cott” with Tamboli’s affirming their stance.

“I think we’re seeing more and more every day that people are coming to the side that they don’t agree with them being here, seeing how they’re harming our community so much,” said Taylor Herndon, owner of Board to Beers, a board-gaming bar near the University of Memphis. Her bar is participating in the national guard lockout, which she says has had a positive impact on business, similar to Tamboli’s.

“We have a lot of customers that we have started seeing because of the boycott,” she said. “We already had a large following, but the boycott has definitely helped us reach even more of our community, and we’ve had a lot of people reach out and thank us for being on the right side of history, and that they feel comfortable coming because of it and that they feel support because of it, which has been amazing.”

She said she was disappointed that formal resistance by Memphis’s elected leaders has been comparably tepid. “It’s been hard, because I keep fighting and I keep fighting, and it seems like things just keep getting worse. Despite thinking: ‘Oh, it can’t get any worse,’ but it does,” she said.

Democratic-led cities like Portland and Chicago strenuously resisted national guard deployments – rhetorically, in court and in the street. But the Memphis city council rejected a resolution condemning the federal surge when it first arrived, and public reaction had largely been muted until recently.

The activities of the national guard have been as “transparent as mud”, and an immigration raid on the El Corralón nightclub earlier this month by the taskforce – resulting in 120 arrests, the most in one operation in state history – is exacerbating the change in public sentiment, Chambless said. Many of the people arrested in the raid have already been deported.

The children of deportees presented themselves at the Memphis city council hearing Tuesday, to a chamber that has become more receptive to resistance after elections earlier this year.

A new crop of county commissioners may restart legal action, she added.

“We’re hopeful that maybe they will take up that cause. Especially now that the damages have been shown,” Chambless said. “Tyrin Johnson certainly would still be alive if the national guard had been stopped.”