Asheville police data shows marijuana often secondary in arrests

Marijuana keeps showing up in Asheville arrest records, but the city’s newest data suggests it is usually not the offense driving the arrest. The practical takeaway for Buncombe County is blunt: if residents hear about marijuana cases, they should look closely at what else is in the file, because the drug is often secondary to broader criminal or public-safety allegations.

That distinction matters in Asheville, where policing debates often overlap with concerns about downtown disorder, homelessness, drug activity and the reach of the criminal-justice system. The city says the Asheville Police Department shares data to help the public understand how law enforcement works, and the department’s public records tools reach back to 2003. Its open-data portal updates arrest records daily, and the Police-to-Citizen system gives the public another way to inspect recent arrests. Taken together, those tools make it easier to test assumptions against the actual record instead of relying on a handful of anecdotes.

North Carolina law also helps explain why marijuana still appears in arrest data. Under state statute, possession of more than one-half ounce of marijuana is punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor. Marijuana is still a criminal offense in North Carolina, not a civil violation, so it can surface in arrest records even when it is not the most serious charge in a case.

That legal backdrop is unfolding alongside a shifting policy debate at the state level. A North Carolina advisory council recommended legalizing marijuana through a tightly regulated market earlier this month, and Senate Bill 350 was filed in the North Carolina General Assembly last year to legalize and regulate cannabis. Those moves do not change Asheville police records on their own, but they underscore how quickly the policy landscape is moving while local arrest data remains public and searchable.

For Asheville and Buncombe County, the value of the new data is not just in what it says about marijuana. It is in what it reveals about enforcement priorities overall. If marijuana is usually a secondary charge, then the harder questions are about what offenses are actually triggering arrests, how often police are addressing more serious conduct, and whether local enforcement matches community expectations. Buncombe County Government’s 2024 Cease Harm Final Report and other public-safety materials show that harm reduction and diversion remain part of the broader local conversation, making the APD data a useful measure of where that debate meets the street.