PEACE ON THE STREET PROTEST TO STOP THE SALE OF GANG CAPS

The protest was an overwhelming success. By the next day both the New York Yankees and the National Baseball League had condemned the caps. Late in the day Christopher Koch, the President of New Era Caps, announced a nationwide recall of the caps. There was general outrage over New Era’s sale of the caps and the majority of Yankee fans polled said that the Yankees should sue New Era.

A short documentary of the protest was filmed and can be seen here. The protest was covered by NY1, CBS And Fox News and www.youtube.com

When New Era issued the withdrawal they claimed to know nothing of the gang connection. This was met with some skepticism by Roy Johnson in his column Ballers, Gamers and Scoundrels as well as the editor of the Time Ledger. We thought that it might be possible that New Era was really unaware of this type of problem. New Era is a privately held company that made in excess of $80,000,000 last year. Perhaps they were just extraordinarily naive. But looking a little further we found that New Era was caught marketing gang caps just a couple of months earlier in Cleveland.

Channel 2 News on June 12th reported on it. Gary Matos, a New Era vice president, is quoted as saying: “New Era says it's not in the business of making hats for gangs and because of what happened in Cleveland, it's making some changes. "It did make it clear to us that we need a heightened level of review," said Matos. "One thing we'll be doing is actually reaching out to local police stations. There are gang suppression units that list gangs, their names and so on. We want to check that list so we don't fall into the same situation in the future."

The Buffalo news documented that this was the second time that New Era was caught marketing gang caps on Sept 8^th The Daily Hip Hop News on SoHH.com also reported on the Cleveland gang caps. We find that it was El-hajj Khalid A. Samad, Executive Director of Peace in the Hood that caught New Era selling the caps. I spoke with Mr. Samad who had little doubt that New Era knew what it was doing.

The Hip Hop News article also contains Mr. Matos’ assurances.  Mato revealed that the company plans to take steps to ensure that it never happens again. ""We plan to work with police gang suppression units to get the names of gangs across the U.S.," Mato said, ” We also have told our sales force to ask 'why' if a logo is obscure." The Daily Hip Hop news also shared their reader’s skepticism concerning New Era’s assertion about not knowing about the gang connection.

Other news sources reported on the Cleveland gang caps and other representatives of New Era promised that it would never happen again. From the Plain Dealer we find New Era spokeswoman Dana Marciniak, stating “ the company pledges to do more research before creating new designs and wants to work with city and neighborhood officials.”

Six weeks later, on July 29^th, New Era in an interview in Format questioned Sid Dey, the director of retail operations about the gang cap recall in Cleveland. He says, “We’re pretty strict in the first place about collaborations. At the end of the day, New Era is a heavy custom manufacturing company. A big chunk of our product is custom product, and we do have a committee that reviews every design that comes forth, but, in that case, that is one that slipped through the radar. We’ve tightened up the process on our side, we have a task force we’ve worked with police agencies.”

So we have Gary Matos, a New Era vice president, Dana Marciniak, their spokesperson and finally Sid Dey, New Era’s director of retail operations all knowledgeable about the problem of gang hats, all promising to work with the police and experts to insure the problem would not reoccur and all strangely quiet on August 24th when New Era was forced to do a nationwide recall of gang caps. What happened to Mr. Dey’s task force?

New Era has a Flagship store in Manhattan down in the Village. After the story broke about the gang caps we were approached by a couple of students that told us that the New Era store carried the gang caps but removed them at the beginning of August. Were Christopher Koch and the other New Era executives told that they were selling caps designed for Crips, Bloods and Latin Kings? Did they decide to remove them from their Flagship store and continue to sell them throughout the country? One thing we do know is these gang caps were made in house, they weren’t the custom product that Sid Dey speaks about.

I guess the real question is what did Christopher Koch and his executives know and when did they know it?

Stan Koehler

Executive Director - Peace on the Street