The counterfeit market on Canal Street operates in plain sight. The vendors spread their wares—the fake Louis Vuitton bags, Rolex watches, Gucci wallets, and Prada sunglasses—across blankets and folding tables. When the police approach, the vendors gather up all their merchandise and scatter; when the police eventually leave, they come back and start selling again.
It isn’t because the NYPD has stopped arresting them—in 2025 alone, cops in the 1st and 5th Precincts, which cover Canal Street and its surroundings, made 908 arrests for trademark counterfeiting. More than 92 percent of those arrests were booked as felonies, according to NYC Open Data. But then, in almost all the cases, the felonies disappeared.
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Across Manhattan, of the 696 total counterfeiting cases in 2025, just two were arraigned as felonies, while 694 were arraigned on misdemeanors, according to New York State Pretrial Release Data. And the misdemeanor cases rarely produce serious consequences. From 2022 through 2025, 68 percent of Manhattan’s counterfeiting cases ended in adjournments in contemplation of dismissal (ACDs), compared with 17 percent of other Manhattan misdemeanor cases. Another 340 cases were dismissed outright, 181 in the “furtherance of justice” and 138 on speedy-trial grounds.
In October 2024, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry proudly announced on social media that the department had cleared Canal Street of “unlawful vendors.” He included a video, made with impressive production quality, to show how the department’s Community Response Team had “swiftly [implemented] our plan and delivered the results you deserve.”
Three days later, the Community Response Team, working with officers from the 5th Precinct, was back on Canal Street. Police arrested three people and seized another haul of counterfeit goods. Daughtry again posted videos of the operation.
The police returned the next day, then day later, and again in 2025. Each operation brought more confiscations, more arrests, and more promises to reclaim the sidewalks. “Despite confiscations and summonses, some vendors returned today, only to face more consequences,” Daughtry wrote after one operation.
The first half of that sentence proved more durable than the second.
Daughtry, who would be named deputy mayor in 2025, has since left the NYPD and City Hall. The illegal vendors, many of them illegal immigrants, remain.
What explains this difficulty in suppressing the Canal Street counterfeiters? Interviews with former and current law-enforcement officials, along with court data, suggest that the problem owes to a combination of inconsistent policing and lax prosecution, an unreasonably high legal bar for proving felony charges, and civilian complaints against cops.
Part of the problem is what happens after police make an arrest. Trademark counterfeiting can be charged in New York as either a misdemeanor or a felony. Third-degree trademark counterfeiting is a misdemeanor; second- and first-degree counterfeiting are felonies. To sustain the felony charges, though, prosecutors must establish that the retail value of the genuine versions of the fake goods exceeds statutory thresholds—$1,000 for second-degree counterfeiting and $100,000 for first-degree counterfeiting. Those thresholds help explain why felony arrests on Canal Street so rarely become felony prosecutions.
A spokesman for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office told City Journal that prosecutors evaluate each case “based on the specific facts and evidence.” He continued: “In addition to arraigning and prosecuting these matters in court, we conduct long-term investigations to address the flow of counterfeit goods into New York City and the systemic reasons they appear on our streets in the first place.”
But the disposition data show how little punishment individual street arrests typically produce. “There’s no prosecution for it,” said John Chell, a former NYPD chief of department. So far in 2026, 62 percent of resolved counterfeiting cases have ended in ACDs, according to OCA-STAT data.
Neither misdemeanor nor felony trademark-counterfeiting charges are bail-eligible, according to the Manhattan DA’s office. For vendors, then, an arrest can mean losing a day, and perhaps thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise, but little more.
“If you want those people who are selling at Canal Street to go away, you have to enforce the misdemeanor laws that are on the books,” Chell said. “You put some of those people in jail for weeks, some months, up to a year.”
A retired NYPD officer who asked to remain anonymous described the economics from the vendors’ perspective. At worst, he said, repeated enforcement might cost a vendor $5,000 to $10,000 worth of merchandise in a month. “But they know there’s going to be no real criminal consequence, and they know they’re going to make that money back tenfold,” he said.
The NYPD has also struggled to maintain a sustained presence on Canal Street. “We didn’t do a good job of post-enforcement,” Chell said. “We didn’t flood Canal Street with the proper amount of cops to make sure they don’t come back.”
That matters because illegal vending is a low priority compared with violent crime and other demands on police manpower. “It’s a low-level thing where nobody’s bothering anybody,” as the retired officer described the attitude toward it.
Police flood Canal Street, clear the vendors, and make arrests. Then officers get reassigned elsewhere. “But then precincts went low on manpower” because officers had to work “everything else,” the retired officer said. Canal Street was left largely unprotected, and the vendors returned.
Even aggressive federal enforcement has failed to change that pattern. In October 2025, federal immigration agents descended on Canal Street after conservative activist Savanah Hernandez posted video of a large group of African vendors at Broadway and Canal Street and urged Immigration and Customs Enforcement to investigate.
On October 21, ICE agents raided the area, arresting about 14 people, including nine illegal immigrants, as a crowd of angry bystanders surrounded the agents. The Department of Homeland Security declared that it was “Making New York’s Canal Street Safe Again” and said that the nine immigrants arrested had records that included charges involving domestic violence, assaulting law enforcement, and drug trafficking.
A month later, Hernandez returned to Canal Street. The vendors were back.
The episode demonstrated the limitations of even a large, highly publicized raid. Unless authorities can sustain enforcement—and impose consequences sufficient to deter vendors—the market simply reconstitutes itself.
At an October 2025 video conference hosted by the SoHo Broadway Initiative, just two days after the ICE raid, a community-affairs officer from the 1st Precinct acknowledged that police were “basically outnumbered” when enforcing vending laws on Canal Street.
When they do patrol Canal Street, some cops are also reluctant to act, as the illegal vendor arrests generate an unusually high number of reports to the Civilian Complaint Review Board—a tactic the retired cop claimed is often used by third parties who may or may not have ties to the vendors themselves. “Once the cops get a certain amount of complaints against them, they’re benched, they’re grounded, and they’re not allowed to even leave the precinct.”
An active FBI agent, who also asked not to be named, said the tactic extends beyond Canal Street. “They’ll have witnesses basically call in CCRB complaints,” he said. Officers then “accrue so many of these they have to step down, or they just say, ‘I’m not going to be aggressive.’”
The numbers show that relatively few of these complaints result in substantiated allegations. In the 5th Precinct, which regularly patrols Canal Street, officers faced 73 complaints containing 221 allegations from September 2023 through the period covered by Police Benevolent Association data. Only 9 percent were substantiated; 52 percent were found either to be unfounded or to involve conduct within NYPD guidelines.
In the 1st Precinct, officers faced 91 CCRB complaints containing 240 allegations since 2023. Just 7.5 percent were substantiated, while 60.8 percent were closed without a finding on the merits, according to PBA data.
“You still never get totally out from under those things, because then it’s like, ‘Well, you have 14 complaints,’” the FBI agent said. “Well, that means you’re doing work.”
The counterfeit market has become so entrenched that it has produced its own joke. YouTuber Nick Shirley made two videos about Canal Street that together drew roughly 1.5 million views. He now sells “Canal Street Run Club” T-shirts and hoodies depicting vendors grabbing their merchandise and fleeing two police officers.
During a recent walk I took on Canal Street, I saw an NYPD squad car headed south on Broadway. Vendors spotted it, too, and immediately reached for the edges of their blankets and tables, preparing to run. Yet the squad car didn’t stop. Instead, it kept moving south. The vendors relaxed their grip and went back to selling.
Chell sees little prospect that the cycle will change. He believes Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has “no appetite” for combating illegal vending.
In March, the city repealed criminal penalties against unlicensed vendors, leaving enforcement up to the Department of Sanitation and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. While Canal Street’s vendors are prosecuted under a different law, the city’s posture on vending generally is moving toward less enforcement, not more.
“Everybody is for small business and people making money,” Chell said.
“But you have to do it the right way.”