‘You can grab me a million times and we will quickly get out’: San Francisco fentanyl dealer allegedly told arresting officer he doesn’t ‘give a f—‘

SAN FRANCISCO — While city leaders, advocates, and police debate how to curb the practice of blatant drug dealing in the city’s downtown, one local man allegedly offered police his two cents on the issue as they were arresting him, again, on suspicion of distributing fentanyl.

“You can grab me a million times and we will quickly get out,” 28-year-old Jackson Torres allegedly told a San Francisco policeman as he was being arrested March 26 for allegedly selling fentanyl on 7th Street. Torres added that he does not “give a f—” about the arrest.

But for now at least, Torres is behind bars, where he faces two separate cases — 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 prior case, and his apparent lack of concern of future prosecutions, to argue that Torres should be kept in jail until his case is resolved.

The charging documents allege that an officer with binoculars spotted Torres make three separate drug transactions from afar. When officers moved to arrest him, he allegedly ran away and tossed three baggies of drugs as he fled. When police caught up with him and placed him under arrest, they claim he had six ounces of the deadly drug in his possession.

Torres has been indicted on charges of possession with intent to distribute fentanyl, and was arrested June 15, court records show. The charge carries a maximum of 20 years in federal prison, but the last time Torres faced a fentanyl dealing charge, he received a much lower term of 12 months and one day in jail, plus three years of supervised release. This time around, if he’s convicted, federal guidelines will recommend a sentence of between 57 and 71 months, though it would be solely up to a judge to make the call.

For years, state and federal officials have been raising concerns over downtown open-air drug markets, particularly in the Tenderloin neighborhood, though no one seems to be able to agree on the solution. Mayor London Breed famously remarked that “compassion is killing people” while arguing for more arrests at a recent news conference, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used the spectacle of open air drug markets in a campaign slot during a trip to the Bay Area this month, arguing that California’s soft-on-crime approach created the problem.

On the other side, many city officials and advocates have argued that an approach centered on arrests and prosecutions would be analogous to the so-called War on Drugs, which burned law enforcement resources but failed to make much more than a dent in cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine sales coast-to-coast. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the formation of the Federal Initiative in the Tenderloin, or FIT, to aggressively prosecute alleged drug dealers, at the same time then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin was calling for for the opposite, arguing that street-level dealers were quickly replaced and that police should focus on identifying large-scale drug distributors instead.

For Torres, the federal charges are only the latest mishap in what has been a difficult life. Court records say he was born and raised in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, but fled gang violence by hopping a northbound freight train, by himself, at the age of 17. He was arrested and detained by federal agents in Arizona, stayed with a relative to Louisiana while seeking asylum in the United States, briefly lived in El Salvador, then immigrated back to the U.S. in 2014, settling in Oakland.

According to prosecutors, he started selling drugs in the Bay Area that same year, racking up the first of 10 arrests between 2014 and last March 26. In March 2020, he was charged in federal court with selling fentanyl, secured a release on bond, then got arrested in an undercover SFPD sting just three months later. When he pleaded guilty and received his 12-month jail term, he’d already served about half of it on pretrial detention.

Torres’ attorney said in 2020 that he expected Torres to be deported sometime in early 2021, upon his release from jail. It’s unclear from court records whether or not he was, but by Jan. 12, 2023, he was back in San Francisco. On that date, a police officer arrested him on suspicion of possessing 10 ounces of fentanyl for sale, among other drugs.