In a huge blow to the knife community and civil rights in general, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo vetoed a bill that would have reformed an antiquated knife law that has resulted in thousands of capricious arrests.
We’ve been following this story closely ever since a Village Voice investigation found that as many as 60,000 people were arrested for illegal gravity knives between 2003 and 2013, with more than 80 percent being black or Hispanic.
The current gravity knife laws are poorly written and open to interpretation from individual officers. People who buy knives legally at stores in the New York area have been arrested for carrying a supposedly illegal knife. With some effort, New York police officers can argue nearly any folder is a gravity knife.