SAN FRANCISCO — As city leaders, attorneys and police debate how to curb the practice of blatant downtown drug trafficking, a local is said to have offered his opinion to police on the issue when they asked him – again – on suspicion of distributing Fentanyl arrests .
“You can grab me a million times and we’ll get out quick,” 28-year-old Jackson Torres reportedly told a San Francisco police officer when he was arrested on March 26 for allegedly selling fentanyl on 7th Street. Torres added that he was not concerned about the arrest.
But for now, at least, Torres is behind bars, where he faces two separate counts — one accusing him of selling fentanyl on March 26, when he was arrested in San Francisco, and another for violating his supervised release from a 2020 conviction for selling fentanyl in San Francisco. Prosecutors are now using that earlier case and his apparent lack of concern about future prosecutions to argue that Torres should remain in prison until his case is resolved.
The indictment alleges that an officer using binoculars remotely spotted Torres in three separate drug transactions. When officers arrested him, he allegedly ran away, throwing three bags of drugs in the air as he escaped. When police caught up with him and arrested him, they claimed he was carrying six ounces of the deadly drug.
According to court documents, following his most recent arrest by federal agents, Torres was charged with possession with intent to distribute fentanyl. The indictment carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison, but when Torres was last charged with fentanyl trafficking, he received a much shorter sentence of 12 months and a day in prison and three years of supervised release. This time, if convicted, federal guidelines recommend a sentence of between 57 and 71 months, with the decision resting solely with the judge.
For years, state and federal officials have raised concerns about downtown drug markets, particularly in the Tenderloin neighborhood, but no one seems to be able to agree on a solution. Mayor London Breed noted at a recent press conference that “compassion kills people” while calling for more arrests, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took advantage of the spectacle of the open-air drug markets during a trip to the Bay Area this month as a campaign slot, arguing that California’s approach to fighting crime softly caused the problem.
On the other hand, many city officials and advocates have argued that an approach focused on arrests and prosecutions would be akin to the so-called War on Drugs, which sapped law enforcement resources but did little more than cut cocaine use – and heroin production and methamphetamine sales from coast to coast. In 2020, the US Department of Justice announced the creation of the Federal Initiative in the Tenderloin (FIT) to aggressively prosecute suspected drug dealers. At the same time, then-district attorney Chesa Boudin urged the opposite, arguing that street drug dealers were being quickly replaced and police should instead focus on identifying large drug dealers.
For Torres, the federal charges are just the latest misadventure in a difficult life. Court records show he was born and raised in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, but escaped gang violence alone at the age of 17 by boarding a northbound freight train. He was arrested and detained by federal agents in Arizona and stayed with a relative in Louisiana while seeking asylum in the United States, briefly residing in El Salvador before immigrating back to the United States in 2014 and settling in Oakland.
According to prosecutors, he began selling drugs in the Bay Area that same year and caused the first of 10 arrests between 2014 and March 26 last year. In March 2020, he was charged in federal court with selling fentanyl, secured bail, then arrested just three months later in an SFPD covert operation. By the time he pleaded guilty and received his 12-month sentence, he had already served about half of it in custody.
Torres’ attorney said in 2020 he expects Torres to be deported sometime in early 2021 after his release from prison. Court records don’t say if that was the case or not, but on January 12, 2023, he was back in San Francisco. That day, a police officer arrested him on suspicion of possessing 10 ounces of fentanyl for sale, among other drugs.
It was his first of three drug arrests in San Francisco in 2023.
