While it might be tempting to grab a bag of inexpensive fruit from a street vendor on your next trip to downtown San José, you should think twice about the quality of what you are buying.

San José municipal police are amping up their operations in the center to curb informal sales of products along the streets.

On a patrol this week, police on bicycle retrieved bags of fruit hidden in storm gutters. They warned consumers that goods purchased from informal street sellers (the ones standing on corners) could be harmful to one’s health. For example, if police hadn’t discovered the fruit, the sellers would have later retrieved it and sold it – after having been in a storm drain where rodents, flies, and dirty storm waters are found.

As officers explained, “Minutes before [we found the fruit], an operation had been carried out in the area where several vendors without health permits had apples confiscated; so it seems a group of street vendors, to avoid police, hid their products in the sewers,” said Marcelo Solano, San José municipal police in a televised interview on Teletica Channel 7.

According to Solano, on previous occasions police have found the food sold by illegal vendors hidden in underground electrical ducts, and even in garbage cans.

Police warned consumers that they are putting their health at risk buy buying products from unlicensed street sellers, and are also encouraging the continuation of a practice municipal officials are trying to eradicate. Many of the products seized by police in the past have been sent for testing and were found to be contaminated, added Solano.

A report of the police operation on Facebook received hundreds of comments, many of them of a xenophobic nature insinuating most illegal vendors are immigrants, and many comments called for deporting people who operate outside of the law.