How a ‘50s-era New York Knife Law Landed Thousands in Jail, Padded Stop and Frisk Numbers, and Brought Right and Left Together - http://joncampbell.org/?p=984
Using a very strict interpretation of New York state’s law that bans gravity knives, NYC police have continued the Stop and Frisk policy, but this time they claim they are targeting people with illegal knives. The Village Voice, Jon Campbell in particular, has done great work on this issue (here is a link to his original piece), along with lawyers working for the Bronx Defenders. The numbers are staggering. In 2011, pre-Floyd, police used Stop and Frisk to stop over 680,000 people in a single year. When Floyd ended Stop and Frisk in 2013, the city continued arresting a huge number of people for violations of the Gravity Knife law (Penal Code 265.01). The switch from Stop and Frisk to gravity knife stops resulted in a lower number of overall stops, but similar numbers of knife prosecutions. Furthermore, even if the overall rate dropped it is still staggeringly high.
This niche law targeting exceptionally rare knives continued, post Floyd, to be one of the five most frequently charged crimes in New York City. For all intents and purposes, the Gravity Knife law enforcement has replaced Stop and Frisk. Thousands of tradesman have been arrested and prosecuted for carrying a knife and a visible pocket clip has become enough reason to stop a person given that random stops were now (and always were) illegal. The Village Voice reported that some theater unions were having their tradesman stopped and arrested so often that they were doing training sessions on carrying knives and interacting with police. Additionally, the law may have been applied in racially problematic ways.
The trick behind this bait and switch whereby Stop and Frisk continues with a new name is the Wrist Flick test. In litigation on the Gravity Knife stops, helmed by KnifeRights (Copeland v. Vance, which, as this article was being written, lost in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, an en banc hearing is pending), police have described how they determine if a knife is a gravity knife (specifically ignoring the traditional knife world definition of a gravity knife–i.e. an automatic knife without a spring that falls open and locks in place). They are trained in the academy use centrifugal force to move the knife down towards the ground and snap it open at the last moment. Under this test, virtually any folder counts as a gravity knife. If you are knife guy watch this video of the Wrist Flick test and then try it yourself (here, by the way, is an actual gravity knife in action). Your most legal, most mundane folder would qualify as a Gravity Knife.
The effect of the Wrist Flick test is that Stop and Frisk, on a slightly smaller scale, lives on. NYC has the most restrictive knife laws in the US and this is why. There is ongoing litigation challenging the Wrist Flick test and the gravity knife law. There has also been numerous efforts to change the law in the legislature, but all of them have been stymied.
The most interesting thing here is the groups fighting the law–on one hand you have staunch Second Amendment and knife folks, typically conservatives. On the other hand you have civil liberty folks and social justice progressive. Let’s be clear-Knife Rights and the New York Times are allies on this issue. That fact along should tell you something–if, in this most partisan of climates, those two groups can work together to fight a law, that law must be REALLY bad. The numbers bear it out–Stop and Frisk lives on, cloaked in the mask of a 1950s era Gravity Knife law. If you care about personal freedom, the right to carry, or just the simple idea of being left alone as you go through the world, pay attention to this fight both in courts and in the legislature. It could come to a government entity near you. Right now, in California, a similarly strict interpretation of fixed blades is starting to cause problems (lawmakers in California: no, a folder in the open position is not a fixed blade).
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