A year after President Trump sent a federal surge into one of America’s most dangerous cities, the Justice Department says the results speak for themselves. Attorney General Todd Blanche went to Memphis on Friday and said crime there has dropped to a 25-year low, and that the approach could work in other cities too.
Blanche spoke at a roundtable with federal and local law enforcement officials, just over a year after the Memphis Safe Task Force launched in September 2025, the Washington Examiner reported.
“Nobody standing alone can accomplish what we’ve been able to accomplish,” Blanche said.
The numbers
Compared with last year, Blanche said, Memphis has seen:
- Overall crime down 34%
- Murders down 33%
- Robberies down 40%
- Sexual assaults down 25%
- Aggravated assaults down 24%
- Motor vehicle thefts down 54%
The task force has also located 196 missing or endangered children and returned them to safety, he said. Since the operation began, the U.S. Marshals Service has reported more than 13,500 arrests and 2,270 guns seized.
The drop builds on a decline that started the year before. According to a White House release in September, overall crime in Memphis fell 28% in 2025 compared with 2024, and the city recorded fewer than 200 murders for the first time since 2019.
Where Memphis started
It is worth remembering how bad things were. The White House said Memphis had the highest violent and property crime rates in the country in 2024, with an overall crime rate 344% above the national average.
The task force launched alongside a National Guard deployment and a jump in federal resources. The White House described it as a “full-scale federal surge” coordinating more than 30 federal, state and local agencies.
By the one-year mark in September, the White House reported 12,747 arrests, including 131 for homicide, 1,276 for firearms violations and 1,408 for gang membership. Across Shelby County, it said, violent crime was down more than 30% and major property crime more than 40%.
“Memphis is the model”
Blanche credited “the men and women who wear the badge” and said the results mean “the citizens of this county, the citizens of Tennessee, are in a safer environment, in a safer street.”
He made the case that the work only succeeded because agencies worked as one team. “If only some of us stood together, it would still fail,” he said. Blanche said the task force will keep going past its one-year mark.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who joined the roundtable, said cooperation among agencies has been the key. “We truly feel that Memphis is the model for how you can move forward,” she said.
Next stop?
Blanche said the same approach could work elsewhere, and named Chicago as a city where law enforcement could work together to bring crime down, according to the Examiner.
That may be easier said than done. The Justice Department has faced public opposition from several Democratic-run cities, particularly over immigration enforcement, the Examiner noted.
The bottom line
For years, Americans were told that crime in big cities was too deep-rooted to fix quickly, and that more policing was the wrong answer. Memphis just put that argument to the test. With a federal surge, the National Guard, dozens of agencies working together and a president willing to commit the resources, crime fell by a third in a single year, on top of the prior year’s drop.
Behind each percentage point are real people: shop owners who were not robbed, drivers whose cars were not stolen, and 196 missing children brought home safe.
The White House release put it in four words: “decline is a choice.” Memphis chose differently. The question now is whether leaders in cities like Chicago will put their residents’ safety ahead of politics and accept the help.
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