A 21-year-old woman has been charged by the DA in a fentanyl bust amid a push to end Kensington drug market

Amid Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s push to clean up Kensington’s open-air drug market, District Attorney Larry Krasner announced the arrest of a woman prosecutors described as a “mid-level” drug manufacturer who packaged fentanyl and was found with more than 1,000 packets of the deadly opioid and two guns, part of a renewed push for drug enforcement in the long-beleaguered neighborhood.

Jada Williams, 21, was charged with multiple counts of manufacturing and possession of narcotics, firearms violations, and related crimes for manufacturing and packaging fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, out of a drug house on the 3100 block of Kensington Avenue, Krasner said Thursday afternoon.

Williams, who is being held on $500,000 bail, was arrested Tuesday with 1,147 packets of fentanyl worth between $5,500 and $11,000, said Paul Reddell, supervisor of the office’s Dangerous Drug Offenders Unit. Two guns — a 9mm and a .32 caliber revolver — were also found in the Kensington Avenue residence, he said.

The arrest, a joint investigation with the Pennsylvania State Police, was carried out in collaboration with and as part of an effort by Parker to step up drug and gun crime enforcement in Kensington. It was one of the first moves in a strategy to move away from what Krasner said was an old and ineffective tactic of combatting the drug market by focusing only on top-level busts or smaller, low-level drug crimes.

A more effective approach, he said, was to chip away at the drug market through operations that take months, rather than years, and target mid-level drug dealers and manufacturers, he said.

“One of the things that has failed before is when you’re only doing the really big stuff and it takes years and you’re only doing the really little stuff and it’s replaced before the end of the day with new workers,” said Krasner. “It’s just not as comprehensive a strategy.”

Krasner’s announcement comes at a time when the Parker administration is taking the first steps to dismantle the internationally known open-air drug market in Kensington, an initiative she made a cornerstone of her mayoral campaign and now a critical goal for her tenure.

Philadelphia police and city workers cleared out a homeless encampment on two blocks of Kensington Avenue in the neighborhood on May 8 and moved 31 people into shelter or treatment on that day alone, 59 in total since early April, drawing praise from neighbors and criticism from advocates and people living on the streets.

City officials initially said the clearing would be led by outreach teams, but no city social service workers were on the scene when police arrived and escorted away people who were living on the streets.

Kensington drug users and service providers have said police had been conducting an informal enforcement initiative for months, ahead of Parker’s planned crackdown on the drug market in the neighborhood this month, citing people for offenses such as loitering and possession of drugs or paraphernalia.

Krasner said he agrees with Parker’s strategy, which focuses on enforcement along with directing people to treatment and housing services, and the hope is that a multi-pronged approach will improve the situation in Kensington.

“The reality is whenever you try to disturb a location that has been opioid central for 60 years, when you try to do that, there are going to be consequences,” he said. “They’re not all going to be good. But I think what is being said by the administration, a sentiment with which I agree, I think what’s being said is we have to do more, in every area.”

Despite city officials’ renewed focus on drug enforcement in Kensington, narcotics arrests remain near their lowest level in 15 years, the district attorney’s office’s data dashboard shows.

The DA’s office charged 1,691 drug offenses in the 24th District, which includes Kensington, last year, the data show. This was a decrease from 2022, when the office charged 1,854 drug offenses, including drug sales and drug possession, in the same district.

As of Tuesday, the office had charged 854 drug offenses in the area this year, which is roughly on a pace to match last year, data show.

Charges for drug sales, data show, are already outpacing last year’s numbers, with 1,095 drug sales offenses charged as of Tuesday. Last year by the same date, there had been 981 such charges.

Staff writer Max Marin contributed to this article.