When Memphis Property Crime Actually Happens: The Hour-by-Hour Data

Most crime coverage tells you where. Almost nobody tells you when. We pulled the City of Memphis public incident file and mapped a full year of property crime to the hour it happened, in Memphis time. The pattern is not what most owners expect, and it changes a few practical decisions about showings, cameras, and how fast you turn a vacant unit.

Property crime here runs on the working day. It is a late-afternoon problem, not a middle-of-the-night one.

What the file shows

Over the trailing twelve months the file records 35,737 property crimes inside Memphis. The bulk is theft, not break-ins:

• Larceny and theft: 15,812
• Vandalism and property damage: 8,365
• Burglary and breaking and entering: 3,447
• Motor vehicle theft: 3,030

Sorted by hour, property crime is lowest before dawn and highest in the late afternoon. The quietest hour of the day is 5am, with 588 incidents across the year. The busiest is 5pm at 2,041, three and a half times as many. The whole stretch from 3am to 7am carries 12 percent of the year's property crime, and the eight hours from 4pm to midnight carry 44 percent.

The climb starts early. By 8am the count has already more than doubled off its overnight floor, and it stays high from mid-morning until about 8pm.

Two crimes, two different clocks

The headline hides a split that matters more than the average.

Theft and break-ins run on a daytime clock. Larceny bottoms out at 5am, around 204 incidents for the year in that hour, and peaks at 4pm at 997. Burglary follows the same shape, quietest around 2am and busiest at 3pm. These are crimes of opportunity, and they track when packages sit on porches, when people are coming and going, and when a vacant home looks vacant in daylight.

Car theft runs later, but it is still an evening crime, not an overnight one. Motor vehicle theft peaks at 10pm and stays elevated from 8pm to 11pm. Its quietest stretch is the middle of the day. So the picture of a car being taken at 3am is mostly wrong: by 3am the count has already fallen off.

Day of week barely moves the needle. The busiest day, Friday at 4,733, and the quietest, Sunday at 4,139, sit within 14 percent of each other. When in the day matters. Which day does not.

What an owner should do with this

• A vacant unit is most exposed in the afternoon, not overnight. If you are staggering drive-bys or asking a neighbor to keep an eye on it, the useful window is 3pm to 7pm.
• Cameras that only arm at night miss the peak. Whatever you run needs to be recording through the business day.
• Harden the porch for late afternoon. Package theft and break-ins cluster from 3pm on, so video doorbells, lockboxes, and delivery timing are the cheap wins.
• If a vehicle sits at the property, its exposure is the evening, roughly 8pm to 11pm. Lighting and a camera on the parking pad do more there than a deadbolt.
• Turn vacancies fast. An empty rental reads as empty at 5pm, the worst hour of the day. Speed to lease is a security measure, not just a financial one.

Crime in Memphis is real, and it is also concentrated, predictable, and down year over year across the city. See the current geography on our live Memphis crime map, the year-over-year direction in Memphis crime is down in 2026, and how it actually affects short-term-rental guests in Memphis crime and the perception problem. When you are weighing a specific street, our best Memphis neighborhoods for rentals breakdown pairs safety with rent and yield.

How we know the times are real

Two things had to be checked before any of this holds up, and both are the kind of thing that quietly ruins an hour-of-day chart.

The file is published in a different timezone than the city it describes. Read the timestamps raw and every hour lands five hours off, which inverts the entire story: it makes the afternoon peak look like a late-evening one and turns the evening car-theft peak into an overnight one. Every figure above is converted to Central time.

Unknown times get parked on a round hour. When the reporting officer does not have a time, the record tends to land on the hour, and two hours absorb most of that. At midnight, 63.5 percent of incidents fall exactly on :00. At noon it is 53.5 percent. A normal hour runs about a third. Both hours are excluded from the curve entirely, which is why the analysis covers 22 hours and 31,267 incidents rather than all 24 and 35,737. Excluding only the exact-:00 records instead would strip the genuine on-the-hour reports along with the dumped ones and carve a fake trough into the middle of the day.

Counts are the reported occurrence times in the City of Memphis public incident file for the trailing twelve months, 2025-08-24 through 2026-08-19.

Quick answers