From Staff Reports

Capt. Michael Lamb of the Asheville Police Department told Asheville City Council on Jan. 11 that 10 percent of all city crime over the past two years has happened within 500 feet of homeless encampments and that the city has updated its camping police in an effort to better address the problem. 

"We used to see that there would be property crime associated in and around the encampments," Lamb told council. "But over the last couple of years, we’ve seen the shift with the increase in violent crime.” 

In the past two years, two people have been murdered and there has been one reported “suspicious death” at local homeless encampments,” Lamb said, adding that there also have been dozens of reports of overdoses, assaults, motor vehicle thefts, rapes and robberies. 

To that end, the APD captain said that, to fight the violence, the city has updated its policies requiring those who are camping illegally to leave the site within 24-48 hours, unless there is an immediate risk to those in the area, rather than the previous seven-day time period.

The 2021 Point-in-Time count that Lamb cited identified 527 people experiencing homelessness in the city of Asheville. 

Of those, 154 were listed as chronically homeless, 188 as Veterans and 469 as single adults.