Latino San Francisco cop accused of 'racism' for arresting Hispanic drug dealers

A Latino San Francisco Police officer has been accused by the public defender’s office of racially discriminating against Latino drug dealers in the city’s Tenderloin district.

The office accused Sgt. Daniel Solorzano, who is of Mexican and Nicaraguan descent and whose first language is Spanish, of arresting 53 people for drug sales over a two-year period – all of whom were Latino – while overlooking 43 other people who people had detained or surveilled, all but two of whom were non-Latino, reports the New York Post.

If the court agrees with the allegation of “racial bias and animus toward Hispanic or Latinx persons” made by one alleged Tenderloin drug dealer, others arrested by Solorzano may get their sentences reduced and the officer himself could face disciplinary action, possibly even termination.

Solorzano, a 14-year veteran of the San Francisco Police Department – who has worked 12 of those years in the Tenderloin –  has been reassigned as he awaits the judge’s ruling.

His defenders say that almost all of the Tenderloin’s drug dealers are Latino – specifically, Hondurans.

Most of the non-prescription drugs dealt in the neighborhood are sold by dealers of Honduran nationality recruited by Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, making at least $1,000 a day each, Tom Ostly, a former prosecutor in the San Francisco DA’s office, told the New York Post.

He added that San Francisco is one of five US cities the Sinaloa cartel-supplied Honduran recruits operate in.

“Maybe it’s the cartel that’s racist for only hiring from one ethnic group and national origin,” joked Ostly.

“We don’t control who sells drugs in the Tenderloin,” said Lt. Tracy McCray, an SFPD officer and president of the city’s police union, who grew up in the city.

“I was a teenager in the ’80s. We had dealers who were white and black selling in the Tenderloin. Now, today, it’s Latino drug dealers. What do you want us to do? We don’t pick and choose.”

The Public Defender could only name five of the 43 people Solorzano did not arrest and acknowledged they were only holding drugs for dealers – a much lesser offense than dealing.

“The Public Defender’s Office is targeting Sgt. Solorzano because he is a champion in the battle against the epidemic of fentanyl deaths in San Francisco,” wrote Solorzano’s lawyer, Nicole Pifori, in an email to the New York Post.

“This year alone he has taken over 18 pounds of drugs off the street. These motions are nothing but a form of harassment designed to dissuade the police from protecting San Franciscans from the scourge created by fentanyl sales in the Tenderloin.”