The attorney general also announced that 121 missing children were located within a 56-day span.
Federal officials on Monday announced that several thousand people have been arrested as part of a two-month-long crime crackdown in Memphis, Tennessee.
A memorandum signed by President Donald Trump in mid-September created the Memphis Safe Task Force to target violent crime across the city, noting that it had the highest violent crime rate for a major U.S. city in 2024.
In a news conference in Memphis on Nov. 24, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that more than 3,100 arrests have been made since then, and 121 missing children were located. At least 500 illegal weapons were also seized under the task force, she announced alongside state and local officials.
“Murder rates cut in half, crime rates in Memphis at their lowest level in 20 years,” said Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee at the news conference.
Bondi said that homicides have dropped around 48 percent, sexual assaults have dropped 49 percent, and robberies have dropped 61 percent during the 56 days compared with the same span last year. Overall, major crimes have dropped 45 percent.
“The people of Memphis deserve to be safe,” she said.
Trump told reporters at the Oval Office in September that he would send National Guard troops to Memphis to join the special task force in the city. It also comprises officials from various federal agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the U.S. Marshal’s Service.
“This task force will be a replica of our extraordinarily successful efforts here,” Trump said of federal efforts in the District of Columbia during his signing of the Memphis order. “And you’ll see it’s a lot of the same thing, although the numbers here are really something, they’re really bad.”
In addition to Memphis and Washington, the administration has sent federal agents and National Guard troops to Los Angeles, Chicago, and several other cities as part of a broader push against crime and illegal immigration.
According to FBI data analyzed by SafeHome.org, a security product website, Memphis had the highest homicide rate in the United States among large cities in 2024, at 40.6 per 100,000 residents. That beat out Baltimore’s 34.8 and Detroit’s 31.2, it said.
From 2018 to 2024, homicides in Memphis increased 33 percent, and aggravated assaults rose 41 percent, according to AH Datalytics, which tracks crimes across the country using local law enforcement data for its Real-Time Crime Index. However, AH Datalytics reported that those numbers were down 20 percent during the first nine months of this year, even before the task force got to work.
As the operation in the city was announced two months ago, the Memphis Police Department said that crime in the city was at a 25-year low across several major categories, including robbery, burglary, and larceny. The homicide rate was also at a six-year low, according to the police force.
Several local Memphis officials criticized the federal task force’s deployment.
J. Ford Canale, the chair of the Memphis City Council, responded in September by recounting the city’s experience during the Civil Rights Movement.
“For many Memphians, the very mention of the National Guard recalls painful memories from 1968,” Canale said in a statement emailed to The Epoch Times at the time, calling the deployment of troops “at best, a short-term measure.”