PATRIK JONSSON, IN THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: What Freddie Gray’s knife says about police power in America.

Courts have given police officers “fair leeway” to make mistakes in their enforcement of the law, including a United States Supreme Court decision on the subject in December. This is necessary “for enforcing the law in the community’s protection,” the high court said.

But the concern raised in Baltimore is that this power has been abused during the tough-on-crime era that emerged in New York in the 1990s and spread nationwide.

“The problem is, when we expand an officer’s right to intrude into our lives, there’s always the question of the appropriate use of discretion,” says Rob Kane, a criminologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia who specializes in police authority. People “are taking pause [after Freddie Gray’s death] … because social science evidence shows that police are going to be most prone to abuse that discretion in disenfranchised neighborhoods.”

Knives have been a favorite target for police under political pressure to clean up the streets, argues Jon Campbell of the Village Voice. Seizing a particular kind of knife has been a cornerstone of New York City’s “stop and frisk” policy, which allows officers to frisk anyone who they reasonably think might be breaking the law.

Police shouldn’t get leeway. We’re expected to know the law, and we don’t get “fair leeway.” They enforce it with a gun.