Residents of Memphis, Tennessee, vented their frustration over a spike in crime after the city recorded its deadliest year yet, according to a local news outlet.
In 2023, Memphis suffered 397 homicides, the worst year on record since the FBI began tracking them in 1960, WREG News reported Thursday.
“Something has to be done,” a mother who lost her son to violence in the city told WREG.
The overall crime rate also hit a record high, according to local outlet Fox 13.
“People in this city are sick of it. We are tired of it. Every day we feel like we are sitting ducks,” said Stan Norton, the chief operating officer of a car dealership that lost two Corvettes to suspected thieves in Dec. 2023, according to a surveillance video aired by WREG.
“They used an iPad. They have these programs. They can be in the car and gone in 30 seconds or less” Norton told the outlet. “It probably happens 10 times a year. The losses each of the past two years have been north of $500,000. That’s hard to absorb.”
Memphis became an exception as homicides failed to drop after the COVID pandemic, the outlet noted. The Memphis Police Department reportedly solved half of the city’s homicides in 2023, down from 68 percent in 2022, WREG investigators found. (RELATED: Video Shows FedEx Truck Blocked And Looted By Dozens Of People)
“There is a small amount of people creating the bulk of the chaos in our community,” Memphis Mayor Paul Young told WREG. Young said he and his team were looking into how other cities were dealing with crime — particularly Omaha, Nebraska, which cut its number of gunshot victims in half over the past 15 years under a crime reduction strategy known as Omaha 360.