The Chicago Police Department is pitching the LRAD largely as a means to communicate with large crowds:

“This is simply a risk management tool, as the public will receive clear information regarding public safety messages and any orders provided by police,” Chicago Police spokeswoman Melissa Stratton told the Guardian.

However, during its first outing at a U.S. protest, during the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh in 2009, police blasted non-lethal sound waves from the device as a crowd deterrent. Unlike firing tear gas or swinging batons, deploying the LRAD does not create a dramatic media spectacle; indeed, videos from the Pittsburgh protests capture the LRAD emitting little more than a high-pitched siren. Those within the sound cannon’s range, however, have described immense pain and severe headaches and — in some cases — irreversible hearing damage. LRAD Corp., which produces the weapon for the military and domestic policing, said that anyone within 100m of the device’s directed sound path will experience “extreme pain,” according to Gizmodo.

“In Pittsburgh, they directed the LRAD at a crowd coming up the center of a wide street, then sent tear gas canisters down the sides of the street. Tear gas is painful, but everyone ran into the tear gas to get out of the LRAD path,” one protester who attended the Pittsburgh G-20 told me, asking to remain anonymous. Chicago’s Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy has recently expressed that he believes tear gas to be an ineffective crowd control device — and based on lessons from Pittsburgh, the LRAD can produce a painful enough effect to force crowd dispersal without the dramatic media impact tear gas creates; it’s certainly a more insidious weapon. (Indeed, the Chicago police riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention went down in infamy partly because of the excessive use of tear gas.)

Norm Stamper, the former Seattle police chief who oversaw the policing of the Battle in Seattle in 1999, has learned some hard personal lessons about protest policing. Stamper resigned after his department was condemned for excessive use of force and tear gas against the ’99 World Trade Organization protesters; he has since become an outspoken critic of harsh crowd control techniques. Of the LRAD Stamper told Salon, “I’m not a fan. And it’s not just because I suffer from tinnitus. Everyone, without ear protection, is at risk for permanent hearing damage. Not worth it, as far as I’m concerned.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has assured Chicagoans that no taxpayer money will go toward covering any summit activity (federal and private money was secured for this purpose). However, Chicago organizers and participants in the counter-summit have nonetheless balked that money can be made available for such purposes, while public services, such as mental health clinics are being shuttered (six out of 12 of the city’s mental health clinics are set for closure, which sparked the week-long occupation of one clinic by staff and clients with the support of Occupy Chicago).

Occupy Chicago’s press committee late last week held a conference to give the media a preview of the week of protests. Although it was made explicit that actions would take place that have not yet been disclosed or even planned, scheduled protests include a march Tuesday organized by National Nurses United (who are paying for 12 busloads of protesters to get to Chicago from across the country). The NNU march will end with a musical performance by Rage Against the Machine guitarist and “guitarmy” instigator Tom Morello, and aims to speak out against austerity measures implemented by the G-8. Having changed original plans to hold the G-8 summit in Chicago the same week as NATO, G-8 leaders are instead meeting this week in the rural seclusion of Camp David. Organizers plan to make their opposition to the G-8 visible in Chicago nonetheless.

Other actions specifically targeting NATO include a procession to the summit headquarters on May 20, during which veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars plan to hand back their service medals to NATO generals in protest against ongoing wars. Occupy Chicago also has plans for an unpermitted march to shut down Boeing’s main office on May 21, in opposition to the government defense contracts the company receives.

Occupy Chicago, CANG8 and other organizing groups have pitched all counter-summit activity as “peaceful,” prompting further outcry that the city is preparing a militaristic crowd control response, especially with the threat of the LRAD.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story suggested the LRAD was a new purchase for Chicago. The riot gear is newly purchased and CPD are preparing to use the LRAD, which they already owned.

It’s beyond the purview of these paragraphs to explain the many reasons someone might take to the streets and shout “fuck the police!” However, as a new report from the New York Civil Liberties Union confirms, the consistently racist practices of the NYPD should make fierce anti-police sentiments understandable, even for those who find such an attitude unpalatable.

Using the NYPD’s own statistics, the NYCLU report highlights what they describe as a “two-tiered” policing system, in which black and Latino New Yorkers receive very different treatment from whites. Perhaps the most shocking finding of all: There were more stops of African-American young men in 2011 than there are African-American men living in the city — and nine out of 10 of those stopped had committed no crime.

In nearly half of New York’s 76 police precincts, black and Latino New Yorkers accounted for more than 90 percent of those stopped; in almost all precincts black and Latinos accounted for more than half of stops. Furthermore, frisks, which are only supposed to take place if police suspect someone is carrying a weapon, occurred far more often if the person stopped was black or Latino, even though white people were found more often to be carrying weapons. The report also notes that despite the 600 percent increase in stop-and-frisks under Mayor Bloomberg, the number of guns recovered has not increased proportionately.

“This cannot stand. Real people’s lives are in the balance. Whole generations of boys and girls are growing up afraid of the very people that are supposed to be keeping them safe,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU, told press on Wednesday.

Is it a surprise, then, that in a march of 5,000 predominantly non-white New Yorkers organized to call for justice for the murdered Trayvon Martin, with Occupy support, that chants moved smoothly from “We are Trayvon Martin!” to “Fuck the Police!”? The greater surprise should perhaps be why more people don’t feel angry at the NYPD. Of course, many will continue to disagree with anti-police marches. However, when statistics on policing show what the NYCLU’s Lieberman called “a tale of two cities,” disagreements should only arise over tactics to redress this system; it seems there’s an overwhelming case for fury at the police.

In a statement, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne defended police practices, saying that “stops save lives” and that New York has this year seen a record low for murders. He said that it is “the safest big city in America,” which prompts the question: safe for whom? When vast swaths of New York’s population live in constant fear of being harassed by a well-armed, uniformed gang — and that this fear is largely contingent on a person’s skin color — this strikes me as the sort of safety I have no interest in maintaining.

Harris’ lawyer, Martin Stolar, told me at the time that he planned to file another motion against the judge’s decision — to re-argue that his client indeed has a standing in fighting the order, and there are strong privacy grounds to resisting the authorities obtaining records of someone’s accumulated Twitter activities (including deleted messages) without a warrant. But now it seems Stolar doesn’t need to file this motion; Twitter has stepped in.

Arguing against the judge’s decision, Twitter’s lawyers point out that Harris does indeed have proprietary rights to his tweets — and has a right to challenge demands for his Twitter records. “To hold otherwise imposes a new and overwhelming burden on Twitter to fight for its users’ rights, since the Order deprives its users of the ability to fight for their own rights.” The social media leviathan’s message is clear: We’ll step in this once so that users can fight for themselves in future.

The points put forward in Twitter’s motion align with those put forward by Harris’ lawyer in the first place. If the district attorney wanted to use publicly available Twitter information as evidence in the case against Harris (which, it bears noting, is a mere violation charge for marching onto the Brooklyn Bridge), then it is possible to follow users on Twitter and glean information this way. It is another thing entirely to demand — without a warrant — an entire record of accumulated Twitter activity be handed over. (Stolar helpfully compared it to the fact that we are able to watch what a driver in a car does at any given time in public; the authorities would need a warrant to put a tracking system into the car to monitor the entirety of its activities.)

“To the extent the desired content is publicly available, the District Attorney could presumably have an investigator print or download it without further burdening Twitter or the Court,” Twitter argued.

Harris responded happily to the news: “It’s an unexpected but reassuring move, now it’s up to the prosecutor’s office whether or not to drop the whole charade. Either way, we’re setting a precedent that social media users and activists won’t be bullied by the state,” he told me via email (full disclosure: we’re friends).

His reference to a “charade” seems apt: Here we have an incident of a California-based social media company with over 140 million users having to deploy its legal resources for a New York case that, at base, is over a charge no more criminal than a traffic ticket. By nesting its little blue tweet birds on the side of its users instead of the authorities in this instance, however, Twitter have set an important precedent in defending online speech.

Harris took to Twitter to comment on the social media giant coming to his defense: “So I wasn’t expecting the two blue birds with shaved heads and ARs standing outside my door, but apparently Twitter goes hard,” he quipped.

As mentions of “Occupy Wall Street” or “Occupy movement” waned in early 2012, so too have mentions of “income inequality” and, to an even greater extent, “corporate greed.” The trend is true for four leading papers (New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times), news programs on the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), cable (MSNBC, CNN, Fox News) and NPR, according to searches of the Nexis news media database. Google Trends data also indicates that from January to March, the phrases “income inequality” and “corporate greed” declined in volume of both news stories and searches.

Knefel notes that tokens of Occupy rhetoric — most notably the idea of a “99 percent” against a “1 percent” — has seeped into everyday cultural parlance. Since Occupy’s inception last fall, references to “the 1 percent” don’t elicit the response, “of what?”; these numbers are now understood far and wide to connote class disparity  – even though many Occupy participants have at times felt the slogan too reductive to signify complicated socio-politico-economic issues. Knefel points out too “the danger, of course, is that ‘the 1 Percent’ simply becomes a buzzword and ceases to have any connection to the way American capitalism produces and reproduces economic and social inequality.”

FAIR’s findings prompt a number of critiques, both of the media’s attention span and of Occupy’s lasting power. It is a troubling state of affairs that in order to push conversations about rampant inequality in the press, it seems there needs to be continuous, headline-grabbing protests, occupations and public manifestations of anger (with newsworthy slogans, of course). But this should perhaps come as no surprise — after all, it was in recognition of our very troubling state of national and international affairs that Occupy participants took to the streets, parks and encampments in the first place.

Occupy supporters may well be saddened by FAIR’s news: that their important messages about corporate greed and class disparity have not permanently shifted the mainstream media’s coverage of these issues. Knefel’s report is at once a reminder of the long slog it takes to really shift a discourse. It’s a reminder too that mainstream media outlets are fickle creatures, ready to move on to the next shiny object with little focus on the issues underpinning stories.

It’s reasonable (although perhaps less so after the mass mobilizations in streets across the country on May 1) to debate Occupy’s current relevance. For me, the problem highlighted here might not be a radical movement’s failure to stay in the headlines, however; the fault is rather with a mainstream political and media machine that ignores economic and social inequality; hence the importance of radical movements. The question then becomes whether assemblages like Occupy should continue to work to hold the attention of such a machine, or work toward challenging its ability to determine political discourse.

Ample ink has already been spilled (outside the mainstream press, that is) about May 1, some praising Occupy’s success in staging events like teach-ins and the permitted solidarity march, which garnered a diversity of support from union and community groups; some point out the obvious — that no May Day actions actually shut down any of America’s vast metropolises; some have decried the property damage carried out by participants in Seattle; Reuters first reported the day as a “dud” and then recanted, noting it “far from a dud.” We could debate forever, using different, incommensurable metrics, as to whether May Day was or was not successful. But when I think about my Tuesday on strike, my memory is of New York City shrouded in an impenetrable blanket of police.

Having reported on, and participated in Occupy actions for seven months, heavy police presence is by no means unusual. Cops routinely flank banks when protests are called outside, they surround squares where Occupy groups gather, and are swift to disperse any attempts (even when legal) to assemble against capitalism in New York’s public spaces. But on Tuesday, I left downtown Manhattan shell-shocked.

It began on Monday night, when the NYPD, aided by the FBI, raided the homes of prominent activists in New York. Following these preemptive, unwarranted visits — during which activists were questioned about May Day plans –  the police presence throughout Manhattan on May 1 was incomparable to anything I’ve seen in my three short years in the city. Friends, whose time in New York and its radical subcultures far predate mine, agreed; they’d never seen anything quite like it.

Notably, the unpermitted “Wildcat March,” called by New York anarchists and anti-authoritarians, was surrounded by hundreds of police before the 300-strong crowd could even leave its rallying point at Sarah D. Roosevelt park. Barely reaching the sidewalk from the park’s steps, a line of cops stormed into the march’s front banner, snatching and grabbing three participants. I joined a running splinter group as the crowd was chaotically dispersed into smaller marches; we then proceeded, almost one cop to every striker, as we made our slow way to regroup at Washington Square Park.

I didn’t head to the Union Square rally to join crowds swelling to over 10,000; I missed the hundreds of guitarists marching alongside Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello in a “guitarmy”; I missed musical performances, free food and free lectures from prominent thinkers like Francis Fox Piven and David Graeber. Instead I wandered around Manhattan in shock and awe with a handful of co-strikers, counting as I passed every block: at least four cops per corner. The buzz of a police helicopter overhead continued all day; I couldn’t count the number of police vehicles.

Writing for In These Times, Rebecca Burns points out that the police have changed their tactics since the early days of Occupy. Although on May 1 Oakland police once again deployed tear gas, we did not see the mass arrests or large crowd kettles typical of police responses in previous months. Burns notes: “Unlike the now-familiar Occupy scene of demonstrators being arrested en masse in dramatic, late-night evictions, May Day protesters in many locales were arrested individually throughout the day, in some cases for crossing over onto sidewalks or, according to local media on the scene in Oakland, seemingly at random.” There were only a reported 97 arrests in New York relating to May Day activity.

Snatch-and-grab police tactics intimidate crowds, but do not lead to the sort of dramatic mass arrest scenes that capture national headlines; it’s a more insidious form of crowd control. It is worth adding, however, that there was no shortage of police aggression: At one point I saw firsthand as a marcher was grabbed by police in the Lower East Side, his face slammed to the street. When pulled up and taken away, officers covered his face with his T-shirt so onlookers could not see the blood.

Then, after the mass evening march in New York had finished and no more than a thousand people had moved to the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial park at Manhattan’s southerly tip, the NYPD once again covered the area. Some remaining hundreds of the May Day participants had gathered for a mass general assembly; others milled around, sharing stories about the day or dancing to the ever-present drumbeats. The police encircled the small concrete park in time to disperse the relaxed crowd at 10 p.m., when the park closes. Clad in riot gear, the number of officers kept growing; hundreds and hundreds on foot and in vans surrounded the memorial park and every office building, street and corner. The NYPD is a standing army of around 35,000, and on the evening of May 1, New York felt like a city under military siege — it was terrifying.

Those of us who have been inspired by Occupy over the past year, those who see the importance of reclaiming and repurposing space (for public use that is not commerce), and who see the necessity of manifesting in the streets, are not fizzling or losing momentum. We are, however, being trampled, pushed, threatened and dispersed at every turn by well-armed, militarized police forces who once again made clear: We are not allowed to assemble on our own terms in this country.