The $15 T-shirts hung prominently on wall racks and a storefront window display in the tiny apparel and cell phone business on busy W. Broadway in north Minneapolis.

"RULES of the STREET #1 DO NOT SNITCH," read one of the shirts. Another had a picture of former Gangster Disciples gang leader Larry Hoover, surrounded by the gang's six-point star symbol.

Adam Kahala, manager of Easy Wireless, said he was just catering to his customers.

"This isn't Minnetonka or Edina. Its north Minneapolis," he said Wednesday. "I will never discontinue selling these shirts."

But after he called Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan, Kahala rethought his principles. By Thursday morning, the shirts were out of sight.

It was a quick end to a simmering controversy pitting one person's free speech against another person's public safety.

"I don't know if that swayed him, but something got his attention," said Dolan, who told Kahala that the shirts supported genocide in the community.

"He was very generous," Dolan said. "I didn't expect that."

The shirts were already on the radar of neighborhood leaders and politicians weeks before Dolan raised his concerns at a public meeting Wednesday morning. Somebody was going to get shot over these shirts," he said.

By then the shirts had been discussed by a group of W. Broadway business owners and the city's 30-member Youth Violence Prevention steering committee.

Sondra Samuels, a member of the committee and president of the Peace Foundation, saw the snitch shirt hanging in the store window when she was driving her two young daughters home from school last month. She went inside and found the Gangster Disciple T-shirt and others that had degrading pictures or messages about African-American women. She bought a snitch T-shirt and left.

"What's up in here?" she said. "We're trying to revitalize West Broadway with stores that mixed-income people can enjoy. Then you have a store like this."

The T-shirts aren't unique to Minneapolis. Sales of similar shirts in other cities have provoked a similar debate.

Shirts were a popular item

Kahala said that his store at 931 W. Broadway started selling the shirts last year, and that he couldn't keep up with the demand. He claimed another store on W. Broadway also sold the shirts, but none was on display Thursday. He said no one had ever complained to him.

Besides the Gangster Disciple and "do not snitch" shirts, the store also sold a shirt with photos of various Vice Lord gang leaders from Chicago and possibly other cities. In very small letters under the photos were "CVL," which stands for Conservative Vice Lords. That is the gang's faction in Chicago and Minneapolis.

"The shirts speak to [the] mentality of being in a gang and looking for protection," Kahala said in an interview before his conversation with Dolan.

More adults than teens bought the shirts, he said, and he doubted that gang members were the customers because "people in the neighborhood know who the gang members are by their attitude and behavior."