The City of Memphis is planning to bring additional law enforcement resources to the Downtown area, including more officers, more cameras and a new Memphis Police Department command center.
The new command center will be built a short distance from Beale Street, at 250 Peabody Place, and will have personnel stationed to constantly monitor Downtown via camera feeds. Designing is already underway for the center, Memphis Mayor Paul Young said, and there are hopes that it will be completed by April.
Other investments include the addition of nearly 200 street cameras. Once those cameras are in place, Downtown Memphis will have over 400 cameras for police to use.
There will also be 63 upgraded cameras, which Young said were only installable due to having fiber optic connections, that will have the ability to record from a range of angles. The cameras also have an optic zoom, which retains the visual quality of the camera feed.
The Mississippi River, Hernando de Soto Bridge and the Memphis skyline are seen from the roof of the Sterick Building during a tour of the building in Downtown Memphis, on Thursday, October 19, 2023.
The cameras also come with artificial intelligence capabilities, allowing personnel to search for car details in the system and cameras will bring up vehicles that match the description.
“Downtown is a space where we all gather,” Young told a gathering of business leaders at Memphis City Hall Friday. “It’s the only neighborhood that is everybody’s neighborhood. Everybody has a part and a place in Downtown. We think it’s really important that our living room, that our shared space, is safe. But we’re not stopping with Downtown. When we talk about that camera network, with these high-definition cameras, they’re going into 550 intersections all throughout the city.”
MPD has, for a time now, had a policy of bringing 24 additional officers Downtown for events, games, races and festivals. Now, according to Young, instead of having those be 24 random officers each time, they will be the same officers.
“They will have more knowledge of how Downtown goes,” Young said.
Motorcycle officers will also be Downtown to better control the traffic flow during events and canine units that specialize in finding firearms will also be patrolling Downtown.
Aside from law enforcement resources, the city also said it is stepping up efforts to revitalize Downtown buildings and modernize its infrastructure for pedestrians. That pedestrian infrastructure could, Young said, come in the form of bollards that retract into the ground when not needed.
“Where you see cones and things like that that sit on the side of the road all week until it’s time for somebody to come and pull them into the middle of the road on Saturday night,” Young said, “we want to have the type of infrastructure where it’s invisible until it’s necessary.”
A price tag has not yet been placed on those infrastructure improvements, but Young said the city has already begun to put new cameras up.
“We’re not waiting,” he said. “I want that to be an important point. We are investing now.”
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphis police adding more officers, command center in Downtown
