Policing Sound Tools: Disputing the LRAD, Sonic-Spatial Traps, and Protesters’ Rights

Introduction

During a protest in Midtown Manhattan that began on December 4, 2014, and had extended into the early hours of December 5, the New York Police Department (NYPD) blocked an intersection, forming a trap — a technique known as “kettling” — to aggressively arrest multiple protesters.¹ The demonstration was part of a wave of protests that sprang up in New York City and elsewhere in the United States after a grand jury declined to indict the NYPD officer responsible for the death of Eric Garner. Earlier that year, on July 17, NYPD officers Daniel Pantaleo and Justin Damico approached Mr. Garner, whom the officers suspected could be selling single cigarettes in Staten Island. Pantaleo killed Mr. Garner in a prolonged chokehold as Mr. Garner continuously repeated that he could not breathe. Cell-phone videos taken by residents present at the scene were widely circulated and discussed in media outlets and on social media. The grand jury’s decision on December 3 effectively ended any chance that the officer would face any repercussions from the criminal justice system. At the Midtown protest, NYPD officers from the Disorder Control Unit (DCU), the Strategic Response Group unit focused on crowd control, deployed pepper spray alongside a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) 100X against protesters, journalists, and bystanders. The LRAD, sometimes called sound cannon, is a high-intensity sound system that projects focused, high-energy sound beams intended to broadcast live and pre-recorded audio (particularly voice directions) over great distances as well as a piercing “deterrent tone” designed to ensure compliance through pain and shoo targets away. The NYPD blasted the LRAD 100X deterrent tone at close range, intermixing it with unintelligible and conflicting verbal commands. Six of these people subsequently filed a lawsuit against the city and the individual officers who used the LRAD against them, Edrei v. City of New York (“Edrei” hereafter). As the first case about sonic weapons and the LRAD to be truly litigated in US courts, Edrei explored whether weaponized sound violates the US Constitution’s guarantees of freedom of speech, of due process, and to be free from excessive force as well as, crucially, whether sound and, hence, the LRAD can be considered force, or weaponized at all in the first place.²

This article is rooted in our direct involvement in Edrei, a collaboration bringing together constitutional law, sound studies, science and technology studies, and urban studies. Elena Cohen was a central actor in the litigation; Cohen was one of the attorneys who filed and litigated Edrei and authored key filings and declarations in the case that structure this analysis. María Zuazu served as a consultant and expert during the litigation; Zuazu conceived and developed the article’s conceptual framing and analytical design and served as the principal author, responsible for writing and revising the manuscript. In Edrei we leveraged our technical knowledge and minute-detail analyses of the NYPD’s actions, protocols, and training involving the LRAD. Building on previous research on the LRAD and sonic securitization, this essay moves beyond the tactical constraints of the litigation to engage Edrei as a site for a sound studies intervention.³

In the lawsuit the plaintiffs — including the lead plaintiff, Anika Edrei — were all physically injured by the LRAD, experiencing ear pain, migraines, vertigo, and ringing in their ears.⁴ They all endured and, in some instances, live with physiological, psychological, and social damage. They sought monetary damages and emphasized the need for a permanent injunction to prevent the NYPD from deploying the LRAD without proper research, testing, guidelines, training, and supervision. The City moved to dismiss the complaint, arguing that the officers did not violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights, and that, even if they had, they were protected by “qualified immunity” because it was not “clearly established” that their use of the LRAD was unlawful.⁵ While the court agreed with the City that the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights (namely protecting freedom of speech) were not violated, it rejected the defense’s attempt to deny that sound and the LRAD are capable of force, allowing the excessive force claims to proceed. The City finally agreed to settle in 2021, banning the use of the deterrent tone, reviewing LRAD training and protocols according to plaintiffs’ requests, and paying circa $750,000. The core questions regarding the control of sound and space, policing, law, and power remained fundamentally unresolved.

The LRAD 100X is the portable, handheld model within the line of acoustic hailing devices (hereafter AHDs) by the US company Genasys (formerly LRAD Corporation, itself formerly American Technology Corporation or, for short, ATC).⁶ AHDs function as “supercharged” megaphones that produce focused sound beams with extremely high sound pressure levels. This concentrated, exceptionally loud, and far-reaching beam allows the device to be aimed at specific target areas, groups, and individuals, effectively controlling the dispersion of sound in ways traditional loudspeakers cannot. Like all AHDs, the LRAD 100X has two operational modes: “voice” and “tone.” The “voice” mode is optimized for speech transmission and can be used to amplify live input through a microphone or to play pre-recorded messages intelligible over long distances. According to manufacturer specifications, the LRAD 100X produces sound pressure levels of up to 140 dB peak and 137 dB continuous output (measured at one meter) and can transmit intelligible speech up to 600 meters in ideal conditions, and up to 250 meters in environments with background noise levels exceeding 88 dB.⁷ The tone setting is a pulsing composite designed to prey on the workings of the human auditory system and, combined with extreme loudness, cause pain and extreme discomfort. This setting is referred to by different names — “warning,” “alert,” “deterrent” — by police departments and sellers. We use the term “deterrent” tone because it, along with similarly spirited variants like “aversion tone,” was part of the device’s original name when marketed to the NYPD and because it best matches its actual function, which the NYPD insightfully called “area denial.”⁸ Calling the tone “warning” or “alert” is a way to, in James Parker’s expression, gain a “politico-legal advantage.”⁹ In this case, the strategy was explicit and reactive: 2018 DCU training materials informed officers that the tone formerly known as deterrent tone had been renamed “alert tone,” and that all materials were “being updated to reflect that change.” This rebranding serves no function other than to disclaim liability and is part of a broader strategic reliance on euphemistic and otherwise non-informative terminology that extends to the very “long range acoustic device.” This practice characterizes, as Neil Davison and Perre Gobinet discussed, the promotion of non-lethal and less-lethal weapons at large.¹⁰

LRADs have attracted much attention in journalism, activist documentation, and scholarship, reflecting both fascination with and critical scrutiny of sonic weaponry. They are frequently discussed in broader surveys of acoustic violence ever since Suzanne Cusick documented their military deployment (concerning their possible use in Fallujah, Iraq, in November 2004) in the first of her groundbreaking series of articles on the weaponization of music and sound.¹¹ Since their release LRADs were adopted and have operated across military-civilian and government-private security continuums in ways that make the notion of a movement from military-to-police obsolete.¹² Crowd control is perhaps this technology’s most felicitous and infamous function, and is the preferred, main use imagined by its law enforcement users — beginning with the NYPD, which was the first agency to acquire LRADs for this purpose in 2004. LRADs today are present in over a hundred countries and have been deployed in protest contexts across the US and internationally, including spectacularly by the same NYPD during Occupy Wall Street in 2011, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, at Standing Rock in 2016, and during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests; the device generated controversy and a strong response in Chile around Carabineros’ plan to acquire the technology during the 2019 Estallido Social, was used during (and against) the 2022 Parliament protests in New Zealand, and more recently in Serbia.¹³ In March 2025, a machinic sound triggered panic in a 300,000+ silent vigil and anti-corruption gathering in Belgrade. Serbian authorities have denied the use of acoustic weapons and, specifically the LRAD 450XL, which are both illegal and owned by the government in Serbia; this denial has led to an intense dispute and grassroots efforts to document the sound, the presence of LRADs, and their physical effects.¹⁴ In terms of its goals, Belgrade’s misinformation and denials are a cruder version of the City of New York’s somewhat more refined legal strategy. The City appealed to (and lost at) the District, the Circuit Court, and the US Supreme Court to get the case dismissed; in other words, it spent over six years fighting for this case not to be heard.

While the killing of Mr. Garner is not our focus in this essay, it is, along with systemic anti-Blackness, a fundamental context to understand Edrei, as well as anything involving law enforcement and, arguably, the policing of sound in the United States.¹⁵ This includes the LRAD, a device that, at its core, and starting with its very USS Cole “myth of origin,” is animated by and forwards a racialized logic and ideology of sonic securitization.¹⁶ Its 2004 acquisition by the NYPD followed, explicitly, the massive anti-war and anti-racism protests against the US’ imminent invasion of Iraq (and the contested police response) on February 15, 2003.¹⁷ When it was used in December 2014, it was used against protests that, as Vanessa Valdés helps frame, contested the legal impunity afforded to those who kill Black people and “repossessed” spaces through embodied, performative, and aural presence.¹⁸ If this protest was part of a broader anti-racist movement and sense of historical pressure, NYPD’s LRAD use culminated a thickening of the department’s reliance on the device through the “ongoing” Black Lives Matter protests in the city following the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, where LRADs had been deployed in their then-most visible US use. More specifically, this article shows the LRAD’s deployment and legal treatment in Edrei to extend a longer genealogy of racialized sonic-spatial control in the United States, where sound is weaponized to suppress anti-racist assembly and uphold what Jennifer Stoever calls the “sonic color line,”¹⁹ which played out as much in the streets of Midtown Manhattan as it did in the court’s subsequent decisions.

Work in sound studies underscores how the law both regulates sound and depends upon particular listening practices. James Parker’s call for an “acoustic jurisprudence” has invited scholars to engage the law as “a form of power that shapes our sonic worlds” and, more specifically, as a generative and at times complicit power that “authorizes and channels” violence “toward the acoustic.”²⁰ This speaks to the uneasy place of sound in juridical reason, which Veit Erlmann elaborates as law’s intrinsic “sonic limbo.”²¹ Together with, importantly, Cusick’s analysis of “no-touch torture” and previous work by one of us on sound’s particular valences in the enactment and legitimization of state-sponsored and humanitarian violence, this scholarship points to sound’s capacity to render violence present and deniable — a dynamic that the LRAD, operating “between shouting and shooting,” explicitly exploits.²² How courts listen is mediated by technologies, phobias, and localized histories; the LRAD itself advances both a predatory conception of audition and a politics of (not) listening.²³ Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s concept of the “juridical ear,” together with his critiques of racially inflected forensic listening practices, demonstrates how courts are often trained to filter, distort, or dismiss sonic evidence.²⁴ Dolores Inés Casillas and Stoever have shown how, in the murder trial of George Zimmerman for killing unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin, “reasonable” speaking and listening were defined through the sonic color line, excluding Black testimony from being fully heard.²⁵ Our analysis here is particularly indebted to Lilian Radovac’s history and analysis of sound legislation qua instrument of social and political control in New York City, a history that, as we show, materially shaped the conditions leading to and informing the decision in Edrei.²⁶

We are in good company. This article contributes to these conversations by tracing the entanglement of a technology whose violence depends upon sonic deniability, legal institutions that struggle to hear sonic harm, racialized regimes of listening, and the corporate-police-judicial assemblage through which the LRAD circulates. Drawing on our insider perspective, it provides an empirical analysis of the socio-technical and corporate foundations of sonic violence and demonstrates how the deployment of the LRAD emerges through the intertwined histories of corporate interests, policing practices, judicial interpretation, and the regulation of assembly and public space. At the same time, our collaboration in the litigation demonstrates how sound studies can function not only as a critical analytic, but also as a tool for civil rights advocacy and policy change.

We focus on two central threads that structure the Edrei case and illuminate the politics of listening in law and policing. First, we examine how the LRAD’s purported “novelty” was strategically marshaled by the defense as a legal shield. This move attempted to limit police accountability; it also reflected a fascination with gear in policing where devices are acquired speculatively based on corporate marketing, without demonstrated need or proven efficacy. Second, we explore how the courts failed to apprehend space as an active and ideological component of protest and propose that this failure is fundamentally entwined and compounded with their misapprehension of sound. Treating public space as a passive container for speech rather than as a co-constitutive medium, the judiciary left unchallenged the LRAD’s role in physically dismantling protest through sound. Tracing these two threads through the Edrei litigation, we show how legal doctrine reproduces a racialized sonic order in which the state’s use of sound to control movement and expression is rendered legitimate, while the sonic presence of dissent is cast as, to use the NYPD DCU’s expression, “inordinate.”²⁷ The analysis that follows situates Edrei within both the legal genealogy of the “war on noise” and the broader cultural politics of sonic weaponry, offering a critical-aesthetic toolkit for counterlistening to the law that, following Gascia Ouzounian, seeks out “the tremors that threaten unbridled state power” to “produce, protect the right to listen.”²⁸

Even though this article refers to technological novelty as working like a loophole in the context of excessive force cases, or describes courts’ spatial and sonic reasoning in freedom of speech cases as failed, we do not suggest these are malfunctions within the US legal system. Such outcomes, following Tyler Wall and Travis Linnemann, may instead reflect the law’s “built-in permissive structure,” and thus “be the result of a system that has” “historically extended the police powers.”²⁹

Legal Novelty

The defense in Edrei repeatedly framed the LRAD as too new for clearly established constitutional law to apply, relying on the presumptive novelty of not only the LRAD as a policing technology but also of the very question of sound as force. This is a version of, following Erlmann, a somewhat old “trick” through which sound “never attains the status of legal object to begin with.”³⁰ This “fairly new technology” was, according to the defense, “not merely novel, but fundamentally different from other devices used by police that are widely recognized to effectuate force, like tasers or pepper spray,” because it “functions solely by sound,” something “no court has ever held to constitute force.”³¹

“Novelty” does much work in trials involving police use and misuse of technologies in the United States. As Aaron Sussman has shown, the excessive force framework effectively shields police abuse involving new technologies because it requires that a constitutional right be clearly established and previously violated in a similar context.³² This is compounded by a general “pro-defendant bias in excessive force cases.”³³ The newness of “new” technologies becomes a loophole, whereby the lack of clear precedents and rights both for police officers and for courts leads to the dismissal of cases.³⁴

Here, the novelty argument mobilized a set of commonsensical fallacies core to the presumptive slipperiness of sound violence, which the LRAD purposefully exploits. The first relied on the alleged immateriality of sound: according to the defense, “sound is not a ‘substance,’” and “officers’ creation of a sound that plaintiffs happened to hear cannot be considered ‘physical contact.’”³⁵ Then there was a distinction between communication and violence: “The LRAD is not an instrumentality of force, but a communication device.”³⁶ With these arguments the defense was trying to bank on what Erlmann has identified as the already abject status of sound under the law.³⁷ As Erlmann provocatively argues, the law’s structural inapprehension of the material, plastic, visceral aspects of sound and, in turn, the accompanying separation between form and content, between speech and sound, is fundamental for the maintenance of legal authority; in this “feat of legerdemain” sound is “expelled” from the “realm of juridical reason” as an agential object, including as an agent of injury.³⁸ Much of Elena Cohen’s declaration in Edrei was devoted to challenging this premise, arguing that “sound is a physical entity, which manipulates other physical entities, and makes physical contact with ears.”³⁹ The court’s agreement with plaintiffs that the LRAD, and hence sound, can constitute force, though, was not as much an expansion of the legal imagination as the fact that sound’s injurious potential in this case was brutal enough to be legible in clinical diagnoses — at Mount Sinai Eye and Ear Infirmary, one of the plaintiffs was diagnosed with hearing loss, finding that the extreme pressure of the LRAD beam had pushed a bone in his ear inwards, causing nerve damage. Alongside this false, foundational dichotomy, the novelty claim was grounded on LRAD Corp. promotional materials used as exhibits. These fulfilled a double and slightly contradictory function: as proof for a claim on what the LRAD “is” and “is not,” and as proof of what NYPD officers (and the NYPD at large) could have reasonably thought the LRAD “was” when they used it against plaintiffs. As the defense argued: although plaintiffs described LRADs as “more a sound weapon than a traditional loudspeaker,” they had to concede it was marketed as a “mass notification solution” for police to “quickly communicate instructions to large groups.” And in any event, “to the extent that the use of the LRAD 100X to communicate instructions could be considered ‘force’ at all (which defendants deny), such ‘force’ was de minimis at best.”⁴⁰

NYPD’s High-tech Toy

While (unsuccessfully) marshalling the LRAD’s “novelty” as a legal shield, the defense was trying to play to its clients’ fascination with the device and, in turn, revealing the NYPD’s vulnerability to branding. Novelty here matters not because the LRAD or the legal questions it raised were truly new, and not because the strategy failed to shield police from accountability in Edrei, but because novelty was central to the LRAD’s branded allure, its procurement, and the indistinction between the two. The defense’s description of the LRAD as a “ground-breaking, portable acoustic device” echoed corporate marketing copy.⁴¹ A large percentage of Edrei’s exhibits were promotional materials produced by LRAD Corp., and much of the NYPD training consisted of memorizing promotional one-liners. These exhibits were intended to challenge the lawfulness of the LRAD deployment and to otherwise show the NYPD’s liability. Taken together, they simultaneously paraded a structural indistinction between corporate and policing interests; a collapse between private profit and public safety, marketing and protocol, branding and instruction, hype and service that are central to the origin, concept, and socio-technical trajectories of AHDs.⁴²

The NYPD first acquired LRADs in 2004, soon after the device’s release and in anticipation of the Republican National Convention. In a press release that year, then-American Technology Corporation (ATC) quoted the NYPD referring to the LRAD 3300 as a “new high-tech toy” that would allow them to “address tens of thousands of people from as far as three blocks away.”⁴³ The high-tech toy moniker bespeaks a boyish techno-fantasy, what Steve Goodman might call a “militarized male fantasy of efficient sonic weaponry,” much more than a serviceable or even sensible law enforcement tool.⁴⁴ Since ATC chose to spotlight that quote in its promotional announcement of its by-then star product’s “first official use of LRAD for crowd control by law enforcement” (it had been purchased, not yet deployed), it is clear that ATC believed this phrasing would prompt other police departments to want one as well.⁴⁵ In an undated update to the 2010 “Briefing,” the NYPD itself would quote the LRAD Corp. referring to its former high-tech toy as the company’s “first science project.”⁴⁶ In addition to speaking to law enforcement’s vulnerability and to the collapse between sales pitches and public duties, this also indicates that the acquisition of the LRAD was exploratory, a solution in search of problems.⁴⁷

Untestings and Failing Upwards

One way of understanding how this case was argued and proceeded in court is as a series of tests: whether police use of the device passed the “shocks the conscience” test, whether the actions were objectively reasonable and, figuratively, too, defendants were at times seeing what would stick. The device itself had never been properly tested by the NYPD; this was one of plaintiffs’ main complaints, and one of the reasons why the City and the NYPD and not just the two officers were named as defendants.

When the NYPD’s Disorder Control Unit (DCU) conducted its testing in 2010, it did not take any readings within 320 feet of the front of the LRAD device, calling that zone a “potential danger area” and labeling it “not tested.”⁴⁸ (The back of the device used on December 4-5, 2014 had a label clarifying that it was a “DANGER AREA”). Equally important here are the results of the things that were tested: although the same DCU “Briefing on the LRAD” states that the “results of tests conducted by the [DCU] in 2004 are unavailable,” it notes that LRADs had been used “with mixed results” that same year.⁴⁹ In 2016 all LRADs underperformed with respect to the manufacturer’s ratings in the NYPD’s peak decibel test.⁵⁰ This same briefing cited Pittsburgh as a model of successful deployment for newer LRADs, even though it was precisely there that the “danger area” had been tested on and caused irreversible damage to a citizen who was not even participating in the protests.⁵¹

By 2014 there was ample available data, as LRADs had been tested, and arguably failed, quite spectacularly in the field. Two precedents are most immediate: earlier that same year in Ferguson, Missouri, as part of the widely publicized violent, racist, and ineffectual police response to the protests that followed the killing of Black teenager Michael Brown by a Ferguson PD officer, and in Pittsburgh in 2009, where LRADs were deployed as part of the crackdown on anti-capitalist collectives protesting the G-20 summit. Both instances are also significant, and a direct model for the NYPD, in that LRADs were deployed alongside measures that the very people who sell and who deploy LRADs against protesters claim are more harmful than the device. LRADs, in other words, did not work as a safer alternative, nor as an alternative to but as an addition to tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray — traditional and putatively less refined forms of less-lethal violence.

And yet, despite this clear failure, then-LRAD Corp. proceeded to use footage from Fox News coverage of the Ferguson protests in its advertising, touting the device as having “peacefully dispersed” crowds, and de facto using Ferguson as a promotional stage to boost sales.⁵² According to the US Department of Justice, the LRAD did not work in Ferguson as anything other than a glorified bullhorn that, instead of providing de-escalation, enhanced the hostility of Ferguson’s aggrieved citizens-demonstrators, failed to disperse people, and made the police look bad. That is, it failed at everything other than at being a loudspeaker.⁵³ During the Edrei litigation, the NYPD’s use of the LRAD at demonstrations was characterized as a “new phenomenon” that began in late 2014, notably at protests following the non-indictment of Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Brown. It kept being deployed in the context of “ongoing anti-police brutality protests.”⁵⁴ Ferguson, in this sense, was not just a precedent but part of an expanding circuit of police violence: the same killing of a Black person, same absence of accountability, and same sound-based display of force.

LRAD’s Pittsburgh performance is, too, a precedent in more than one way: this is repeatedly quoted as a success story and presented as exemplary — often “the” real example — in training and internal NYPD materials, which in turn parrot LRAD Corp’s marketing materials and often were directly prepared by LRAD Corp. representatives. Pittsburgh is used as an illustration of the device’s crowd control functions in promotional materials such as the brochure Law Enforcement Solutions, which includes the following quote from a Pittsburgh law enforcement official: “Every police officer I talked to thought it worked famously, the bottom line is we could maintain order with the protesters without hurting them.”⁵⁵ Pittsburgh’s use of the LRAD was widely criticized and cost the city a $72,000 settlement, as well as permanent hearing loss, nausea, pain, and disorientation for bystander Karen Piper.⁵⁶

Per the NYPD LRAD training materials revealed during discovery, a brief commentary on the legal consequences of Pittsburgh appears in the instructor’s script of “LRAD Operator Training”: After perfunctorily acknowledging and discrediting the existence of “few civil cases where hearing loss or some of the symptoms” that the lesson has just instructed officers LRAD tones cannot possibly cause, the instruction downplays Piper: The risk of causing hearing damage and of having to pay “nominal” monetary settlements is framed as lesser than that of failing to “give clear and intelligible instructions.”⁵⁷ If the LRAD is a “technology of risk management,” here that function appears in explicit and quantitative terms.⁵⁸ Even as they are seemingly instructed to better navigate, to use Eyal Weizman’s term, the “economy of violence,” this faulty training and misinformation amplifies the bargain with police officers themselves, who enter this economy not as the users but as the operators, as employees exposed to hearing injury and liability and who are, too, subjects of this bargain.⁵⁹ The same training sessions where LRAD-caused hearing damage was taught to be worth it and, all in all, a good deal when accounting for the final price tag and legal accountability, opened with the following words, in quotation marks, which is an apparent medley of comments attributed to Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr: “Peaceful resolutions can only come from an understanding. To achieve an understanding, you must have effective communications. To achieve effective communications, you must be heard.”⁶⁰

There was little talk about communication in the DCU’s 2011 funding requests for replacing their two LRAD 3300s with twenty newer LRADs (which most likely included the specific device partaking in the events that led to Edrei) in the context of Occupy Wall Street.⁶¹ As “disorder control equipment,” LRADs were intended “to minimize potential liability” and “maintain readiness for civil unrest,” with the document specifying these devices would be particularly handy in “large scale demonstrations where there is an inordinate amount of noise.”⁶²

The Sonic-Spatial Trap

Access to and control over space is a major form of power. Technologies like the LRAD are “particular instantiations of quests to control the propagation of sound and the curation of acoustic signals and environments” as a means to “exert power and to control the behavior” of people — especially to “discriminate amongst them” and forcefully “keep them within or outside a particular place.”⁶³

The court’s finding in Edrei that plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights were not violated relied on the City’s claim that the NYPD used the LRAD to promote “public safety and order” and “the free flow of traffic on public streets and sidewalks.”⁶⁴ The court noted that while a police dispersal order would typically require analysis under the stringent “clear and present danger” standard, it here applied the much more forgiving “time, place, and manner” doctrine, because the police “only relocate[d]” demonstrators and because the Court found that “there are no plausible allegations that defendants Maguire and Poletto used the X100 because of the content of any speech by plaintiffs.”⁶⁵ And yet the factual pattern revealed during the litigation, amply supported by testimony and video recordings, shows the LRAD to be a chaos-contributing instrument. It de facto exhausted an urban space it itself, alongside vehicles, pepper spray, and officers’ bodies, had redefined by denying areas and herding participants in ways that were detrimental to the “public.”

The events leading to Edrei came hours into what had been a smooth demonstration where police officers seemed to be escorting protesters as they moved through Manhattan. The atmosphere shifted abruptly at 1:00 a.m., when the NYPD used unmarked and marked police vehicles to form a kettle at the intersection of 57th Street and Madison Avenue and effectively blocked all traffic. Participants and journalists marched into this enclosure to find themselves trapped and find police effectuating arrests in a manner that appeared to involve excessive force. As plaintiffs and others attempted to photograph the arrests, officers, without warning, deployed pepper spray, and as people tried to flee the intersection, defendants Maguire and Poletto began deploying the LRAD 100X’s deterrent tone. The officers followed and herded participants through the length of an avenue block, a 750-foot gauntlet, firing the tone seventeen times in under three minutes. The LRAD’s beam, crucially, was directed against observers and photojournalists, including Anika Edrei and Shay Horse, preventing them from getting close enough to document the arrests — a use that is highlighted in LRAD materials targeting the law enforcement market. Angling the device at citizens on the sidewalk from distances of ten feet or fewer — well within the labeled ten-meter “danger zone” — and combining the deterrent tone with contradictory commands, police not only used the LRAD to deny, displace, endanger, and harm but also made it physically and auditorily impossible to “obey.”

The NYPD’s use of the LRAD and the subsequent court decision are part of a larger tendency of US law to misconstrue the power and importance of space. Legal scholars have urged courts to recognize space as a dynamic and active force that controls and disciplines. As Timothy Zick argues, law on the First Amendment “does not adequately take into account that where a speaker or group of speakers is placed profoundly impacts expressive message, persuasive efficacy, participation, and symbolic meaning,” and that “[p]urportedly neutral restrictions on place can and do cancel expressive and associative rights.”⁶⁶ Crocker similarly insists that “architectural control of place” “is an effective means of asserting state power without appearing to censor speech.”⁶⁷

Another way to conceptualize this relation is that “speech” and “place” are co-constitutive. This is the case when we are speaking in figurative terms, where speech stands for expression regardless of whether this involves linguistics or sound, and place stands for medium and/or context; it becomes all the more concrete when it involves sound and space. There is a longer genealogy of sound-space legislation and control as well as a more localized New York City history. Lilian Radovac’s historical examination of New York City’s “war on noise” in the 1930s and 1940s details how the City actively shaped and controlled urban space through sound regulation in ways that served the interests and responded to the anxieties of the white middle and upper classes, framing “noise” as a symptom of “urban disorder” and a “spatial problem” to be managed through “policing and surveillance, and, ultimately, the reconfiguration of urban space.”⁶⁸ Radovac shows that “noise complaints were used as a pretext to arrest strikers and other labor activists” and to “constrain and disrupt political protests by restricting the use of sound as a tool of political expression.”⁶⁹ This “war on noise” targeted, too, immigrant and Black communities and advanced a template in which, under the guise of “protecting citizens from unwelcome and excessive noise,”⁷⁰ sound regulations de facto work and are intended to perform as instruments of spatial and social control. Radovac’s history of NYC’s “regulation of sound devices” shows that “its purpose was not merely to limit unnecessary noise, as is generally assumed, but to contain and control radical uses of urban space.”⁷¹ This effectively established what Radovac identifies as over a ninety-year-long “monopoly on amplified public speech.”⁷²

This pattern was codified in Ward v. Rock Against Racism (1989). This case matters here not only because it established the malleable “time, place, manner” standard applied in Edrei, but also because it was explicitly about sound and space, about racism and the protection of the privileged, and because it took place in New York City. The conflict that congealed in Ward, and the subsequent doctrinal precedent, was a fight over loudness. Rock Against Racism (RAR hereafter) held rallies and concerts in Central Park’s Bandshell. Despite having permits, NYPD officers frequently directed that sound be turned down or even shut off the power themselves,⁷³ allegedly in response to noise complaints by other park users and the predominantly white and wealthy people who live near Central Park. In 1986, the City of New York mandated that RAR use a city-provided sound system and technician, stripping the organizers of control over their own mixing and amplification as a condition to perform. This hardly was the “least restrictive” means to make sure that the concert was not too loud. Instead of applying an existing, well-established standard that would have favored the anti-racist collective’s win, the Supreme Court adopted a new formulation that ensured the City’s victory.

The Supreme Court decision in Ward shaped free speech restrictions regarding public space (and helped solidify the diminished legal protections for protests in the United States). The Court dispensed with the “strict scrutiny” requirement that the state use the least restrictive means to achieve a compelling interest in curtailing freedom of expression, introducing a lower standard for so-called “time, place, and manner restrictions.” Rather than needing to be as minimally invasive as possible, a restriction on speech is permissible if it is (1) content-neutral; (2) narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest; and (3) leaves open ample, alternative channels for communication of the information. In other words, if a government is “only” regulating the location, timing, or mode of delivery, it is exempt from the most robust First Amendment protections.

Framing the City’s actions as controlling the “manner” of free speech implied treating sound amplification as a neutral medium separate from the “content,” the Court deemed the seizure of RAR’s sound permissible. The volume and sonic quality of a political performance, much like its site and timing, are inseparable from what it says and does. Two things are key here: first that the “manner” in which “speech” (broadly understood) sounds was treated as a separable variable that can be legitimately and neutrally restricted by the government, and second that this decision was predicated on an imperative to protect (at least some of its) citizens from exposure to excessive sound. In his dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall reproduced the “war on noise” seemingly neutral principle, writing: “No one can doubt that the government has a substantial interest in regulating the barrage of excessive sound that can plague urban life. Unfortunately, the majority plays to our shared impatience with loud noise to obscure the damage that it does to our First Amendment rights.”⁷⁴

Erlmann’s “trick” was at play here. Read alongside Radovac’s historical analysis and critique, Ward and our analysis of Edrei demonstrate that disputes over sound have shaped the regulation of political speech and the conditions of dissent in the United States far beyond sound-specific regulatory techniques themselves, and beyond the governance of loudness alone. Through its malleability, the inconsistent ways in which the acoustic jurisprudence forwarded in Ward has been applied carry profound implications.⁷⁵

Conclusion: Inordinate Noise, Unbearable Listening

These sonic-spatial traps, both the ones tended by law enforcement and those produced through legal doctrine, aim to contain and neutralize protests like the ones for Mr. Garner. Valdés identifies the “repossession and redefinition” of supposedly neutral spaces, building on Katherine McKittrick’s concept of “transparent space,” as central to these movements over and above what is literally and linguistically said.⁷⁶ Protesters use their “bodies as testimony” and sonically reconfigure public space through marching, chanting, and purposeful silence.⁷⁷

As this article shows, this entanglement of sound, gesture, and space-making is, at once, unprotected by the law and targeted by its enforcers. Ultimately what these court decisions protect is white supremacy’s sonic color line, reinforcing a racialized sound-space and an imaginary that, as Jodi Rios argues, serve as “critical instruments in the remaking of the modern racial state.”⁷⁸ The extreme sounds and incomprehensible voicings law enforcement incompetently deployed were meant to counter and cut through what the NYPD’s reporting referred to as “inordinate noise” by rendering space uninhabitable and listening unbearable.

And yet both the events of December 4-5 and the Edrei case prove that this device, for all the noxious politics of listening it does advance, does not even work. Plaintiffs did not move away, or not far and fast enough, which is why they were injured. Plaintiffs were mostly journalists and filmmakers, who chose to stay and document. Some were protesters, who tried to stay to continue speaking out for Black lives. And for many others, including those caught in dense gatherings, under siege, in shock, and the many who do not conform to the ideal of the abled adult imagined to be capable of protest, walking away to avoid pain and injury might not be possible.⁷⁹ The fiction that people are “free to move away” is the unstated premise behind the flawed logics and marketing promises. Of course Edrei itself, this whole process of an expensive and lengthy lawsuit, demonstrated that this “invaluable technology” did not protect law enforcement from liability either.

By agreeing with plaintiffs that the NYPD’s use of the LRAD constituted excessive force while denying the free speech claim, the Court was following the script of the war on noise and of Ward, in that it assumed and further entrenched the responsibility to “protect the ears of the citizenry” and the maintenance of public order. The supposed imperatives to protect people’s ears and order go together as a proxy to control the city soundscape and to control public space.

Instead of a focus on the importance of protest and of access to public space, the winning claims here were focused narrowly on “hearing damage,” understood as a purely medical issue. Even though the court acknowledged that some of the plaintiffs were now “afraid to attend protests,” the reason for finding that the LRAD was excessive force as defined in the Constitution was the physical, measurable, and medically verifiable harms caused by being directly and purportedly targeted with the LRAD’s high-decibel output. This is an extremely narrow conception of “injury,” and is not reflective of what the plaintiffs (and we) see as the actual harm here. The liberal conception of “personal injury” and its focus on individual autonomy elides the communal concern of racist policing through sound.⁸⁰ In other words, the state’s deeply “caring” for people’s ears goes together with its making sure it will be impossible to listen to “content” that is conspicuously not being silenced.

Although this article explores the LRAD, it is not unique or special. Acoustic hailing devices and other devices that use sound to shape behavior are among many in the police toolbox. The NYPD agreed to stop using the deterrent tone after Edrei, but officers have an array of technologies at their disposal, from TASERS and flashbangs to robotic dogs and other new less-lethal alluring “toys” that they will purchase, alongside guns. The procurement of unnecessary and expensive technologies takes on a different import when these are backed by a state power entangled with white supremacy. The LRAD’s status as a commodified, for-profit technology cannot be separated from the anti-Blackness at play; together they make the LRAD yet another racialized tool that mediates democracy while making public space increasingly shaped by, in this case, the sonic mediation of private corporate interests.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their excellent, generous comments. We thank Eliza Marks for suggesting the subtitle, and Gascia Ouzounian for her thoughtful feedback and support. We also thank Beck Jordan-Young and, especially, Sandra Moyano Ariza for their enthusiasm and engagement with this project.

Endnotes

1. According to ABC News, there were over two hundred arrests across New York City during the overnight protests. “223 Arrested as Protesters, Police Clash in New York City Over Eric Garner Decision,” ABC News, December 5, 2014, https://abcnews.com/US/protesters-police-clash-york-city-eric-garner-decision/story?id=27383303. See also Ashley Southall, “Protesters Fill Streets Across U.S. Over Decision in Garner Case,” New York Times, December 4, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/nyregion/protests-continue-after-grand-jury-decision-in-eric-garner-case.html.[↑]
2. As discussed below, one other lawsuit about LRAD-related injury was filed in Pennsylvania. Piper v. City of Pittsburgh, et al., No. 11-cv-01215-MPK (W.D. Pa. September 21, 2009), hereafter cited as “Piper.” This case was quickly settled by the City of Pittsburgh, as opposed to New York’s long, drawn out legal fight. See “City of Pittsburgh Settles G-20 Lawsuits,” ACLU of Pennsylvania, press release, November 14, 2012, https://www.aclupa.org/press-releases/city-pittsburgh-settles-g-20-lawsuits/.[↑]
3. María Edurne Zuazu, “Loud but Non-lethal: Acoustic Stagings and State-Sponsored Violence,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 19 (2015); “Be Heard: Acoustic Hailers as Technologies of Not Listening,” Musicology Now, July 5, 2021; and “Acoustic Hailing Devices: Securitisation and Sound Technologies,” Sound Studies 10, no. 1 (2024).[↑]
4. Hence the name of this case: Edrei v. City of N.Y.[↑]
5. Edrei v. City of N.Y., 254 F. Supp. 3d 565 (S.D.N.Y. 2017).[↑]
6. “LRAD” is the trademarked name for Genasys’ sound systems, all of which are animated by the same (flawed) ideology and practice of “sonic securitization.” See Zuazu, “Acoustic Hailing Devices.”[↑]
7. Genasys, 100X BLK MAG SYS (San Diego, CA: 2025), 1-2.[↑]
8. Disorder Control Unit, “Briefing on the LRAD (Long Range Acoustical [sic] Device),” January 2010, 2.[↑]
9. James E. K. Parker, “Sonic Lawfare: On the Jurisprudence of Weaponised Sound,” Sound Studies 5, no. 1 (2019): 82n7.[↑]
10. Neil Davison, Non-Lethal Weapons (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 6-7; Pierre Gobinet, “Procurement and Policy: Police Use of Emerging Weapons Technology,” in Small Arms Survey 2011: States of Security (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 72.[↑]
11. Suzanne G. Cusick, “Music as Torture / Music as Weapon,” TRANS: Revista Transcultural de Música / Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006), https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/articulo/152/music-as-torture-music-as-weapon.[↑]
12. Zuazu, “Acoustic Hailing Devices.”[↑]
13. For a discussion of the “sonic battleground” of Occupy Wall Street, including the People’s Microphone and the LRAD, see John Vilanova, “Noise-Making, Occupy Wall Street, and the Politics of Amplification,” Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture 2, no. 2 (2021). Noriko Manabe has theorized the broader spatial and sonic dynamics of urban protest, analyzing how both protesters and police deploy sound to produce, control, and contest space, with a focus on protests in Japan in the aftermath of Fukushima; see The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music after Fukushima (Oxford University Press, 2015), 155-175, 234-261. Luke Ottenhof, “Sound of the Police; How US Law Enforcement Uses Noise as a Weapon,” The Guardian, July 14, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/14/us-police-sound-weapon-protests; Oscar Francis, “Revealed: Police Used Sound Cannons Against Parliament Protesters,” The New Zealand Herald, June 28, 2022, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/revealed-police-used-sound-cannons-against-parliament-protesters/PIBFZEHRIOEADS7SK4Y4SWM464/.[↑]
14. A detailed investigation of the acoustic signals and spatial effects during the Belgrade vigil has been led by Earshot, the collective founded by Lawrence Abu Hamdan at the center of Ouzounian’s contribution to this special issue. See also Aleksandar Vasovic and Milan Pavicic, “Mystery Sound at Serbia Protest Sparks Sonic Weapon Allegations,” Reuters, April 2, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/mystery-sound-serbia-protest-sparks-sonic-weapon-allegations-2025-04-02/.[↑]
15. Leslie Alexander’s work provides a historical account and analysis of how contemporary US policing is rooted in militia-led slave patrols operating across the different colonies in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries; see Alexander, “Slavery and the Making of Modern-Day Policing,” unpublished manuscript, 2021. See also Alexander, “How White Fear of Black Freedom Shaped Modern Day Policing,” https://drlesliealexander.com/slavery-and-policing.[↑]
16. Zuazu, “Acoustic Hailing Devices,” 20. See also Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Duke University Press, 2017) for a broader discussion of securitization and race.[↑]
17. American Technology Corporation, “American Technology Reports on Growing Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADtm) Business,” Press Release, August 26, 2004.[↑]
18. Vanessa K. Valdés, “Spaces of Sounds: The Peoples of the African Diaspora and Protest in the United States,” SoundingOut! December 12, 2016, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2016/12/12/spaces-of-sounds-protest-in-the-united-states-and-the-peoples-of-the-african-diaspora/. [↑]
19. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York University Press, 2016).[↑]
20. Parker, “Sonic Lawfare.”[↑]
21. Veit Erlmann, “The Acoustic Abject: Sound and the Legal Imagination,” in Sound Objects, ed. James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow (Duke University Press, 2019).[↑]
22. Cusick, “Music as Torture;” Zuazu, “Loud but Non-Lethal.”[↑]
23. Zuazu, “Be Heard.”[↑]
24. Abu Hamdan, “Aural Contract: Forensic Listening and the Reorganization of the Speaking Subject,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Anselm Franke and Eyal Weizman (Sternberg Press, 2014).[↑]
25. Dolores Inés Casillas and Jennifer Lynn Stoever, “Listening to Racial Injustice,” in Race and Media: Critical Approaches, ed. Lori Kido Lopez (New York University Press, 2020).[↑]
26. Lilian Radovac, “Mic Check: Occupy Wall Street and the Space of Audition,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 1 (2014); Radovac, “The ‘War on Noise’: Sound and Space in La Guardia’s New York,” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011).[↑]
27. New York City Police Department, Disorder Control Unit, “Funding Request for Emergency Purchase of Equipment During the Ongoing Occupy Wall Street Demonstrations,” October 17, 2011.[↑]
28. Ouzounian, “Counterlistening,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 46, nos. 2–4 (June/September/December 2020): 311, 313.[↑]
29. Tyler Wall and Travis Linnemann, “No Chance: The Secret of Police, or the Violence of Discretion,” in A Critical Theory of Police Power in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mark Neocleous, Social Justice 47, nos. 3–4 (2021): 80.[↑]
30. Erlmann, “Acoustic Abject,” 153.[↑]
31. Petition for a Writ of Certiorari at 14, Maguire v. Edrei, No. 18-810 (US 2018).[↑]
32. Aaron Sussman, “Shocking the Conscience: What Police Tasers and Weapon Technology Reveal About Excessive Force Law,” UCLA Law Review 59, no. 5 (2012): 1342.[↑]
33. Sussman, “Shocking the Conscience,” 1374.[↑]
34. Sussman explicitly lists the LRAD as one among “emerging police weapons” whose “poorly understood effects” can similarly “limit plaintiffs’ ability to seek legal remedies” due to qualified immunity. See Sussman, “Shocking the Conscience,” 1387, 1347.[↑]
35. Edrei, 254 F. Supp. 3d at 574.[↑]
36. Edrei, 254 F. Supp. 3d at 573–74.[↑]
37. Erlmann, “Acoustic Abject.”[↑]
38. Erlmann, “Acoustic Abject,” 152, 165.[↑]
39. Decl. of Elena L. Cohen in Opposition to Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss at 4, Edrei v. City of N.Y., No. 1:16-cv-01652-RWS (S.D.N.Y. 2016).[↑]
40. Edrei, Dkt. 36, at 9.[↑]
41. Petition for a Writ of Certiorari at i, Maguire v. Edrei, No. 18-810 (US 2018).[↑]
42. For analysis of the LRAD as a product within a security and disaster audio industry that actively creates and expands its market across the military-civilian, government-corporate continuum, see Zuazu, “Acoustic Hailing Devices.”[↑]
43. American Technology Corporation, “American Technology Reports on Growing Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADtm) Business,” Press Release, August 26, 2004. [↑]
44. Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (MIT Press, 2010), 23.[↑]
45. The Small Arms Survey credited LRAD Corp.’s marketing with US government agencies’ rapid adoption of the device in the late 2000s and early 2010s. See Gobinet, “Procurement and Policy,” 83.[↑]
46. DCU, “Briefing,” 2010, 10.[↑]
47. Zuazu, “Acoustic Hailing Devices.” See also Kelly Gates on the “police media market”: Gates, “The Work of Wearing Cameras: Body-Worn Devices and Police Media Labor,” in The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media, ed. Richard Maxwell (Routledge, 2015).[↑]
48. DCU, “Briefing.”[↑]
49. The briefing notes that these were used to “make announcements to the crowd” in different protests around the RNC.[↑]
50. NYPD Disorder Control Unit, “Preliminary Report of Decibel Testing of Long Range Acoustic Device,” May 5, 2016. This test, unlike the 2010 one, was conducted at one meter proximity. The LRAD had also underperformed in 2010. The older LRAD 3300 was said to feature an “attention-getting and highly irritating warning tone effective 500 to 800+ meters” (1640.42 to 2624.67 feet) but was “barely heard (no register on meter) at 140 parking spots away (1120 feet).” While the briefing notes the test was performed on a windy day, the results were well below the manufacturer’s claimed shorter range. See DCU, “Briefing.”[↑]
51. See “City of Pittsburgh Settles G-20 Lawsuits.”[↑]
52. No longer available, the video remained on the LRAD Corporation from 2014 to at least 2019. “LRAD Safely Disperses Ferguson, MO Protesters,” LRAD Corp., video, 3:10, accessed March 2019, https://www.lradx.com/video/fox-news-lrad-safely-disperses-ferguson-mo-protesters/. It is discussed in Zuazu, “Loud but Non-Lethal,” 158–9.[↑]
53. See US Department of Justice, After-Action Assessment of the Police Response to the August 2014 Demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri (Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2015), 48, 55, 58.[↑]
54. Gideon Orion Oliver to William Bratton, “Re: The NYPD’s Use of Long Range Acoustic Devices for Crowd Control,” fax, December 12, 2014, 3.[↑]
55. LRAD Corp., Law Enforcement Solutions (LRAD Corp., 2014), 2.[↑]
56. See “City of Pittsburgh Settles G-20 Lawsuits.”[↑]
57. LRAD Corporation, LRAD Basic Operator Training Revision 2: Instructor Lesson Plan (training manual, June 13, 2017), 17–8.[↑]
58. Zuazu, “Acoustic Hailing Devices,” 7.[↑]
59. Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (Verso, 2011), 8–9.[↑]
60. LRAD Corp., Instructor Lesson Plan, 4.[↑]
61. NYPD, DCU, “Funding Request for Emergency Purchase of LRAD Systems During the Ongoing Occupy Wall Street Demonstrations,” October 20, 2011.[↑]
62. NYPD, DCU, “Funding Request,” October 17, 2011, 1.[↑]
63. Zuazu, “Acoustic Hailing Devices,” 7. Zuazu’s argument builds on a rich sound studies literature examining the relationships among sound, technology, space, and control.[↑]
64. Edrei, 254 F. Supp. 3d at 577–8.[↑]
65. Edrei, 254 F. Supp. 3d at 577.[↑]
66. Timothy Zick, “Speech and Spatial Tactics.” Texas Law Review 84, no. 3 (2006): 583.[↑]
67. Crocker, “Displacing Dissent: The Role of ‘Place’ in First Amendment Jurisprudence,” Fordham Law Review 75 (2007): 2600n97, https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol75/iss5/15/.[↑]
68. Radovac, “War on Noise,” 736.[↑]
69. Radovac, “War on Noise,” 746. Manabe’s work offers a detailed analysis that highlights the importance of sonic tactics and the urban acoustic environment in shaping protest dynamics, showing how sound constructs the social and spatial dimensions of resistance and policing. See Manabe, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, 155–75; 234–61.[↑]
70. Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 US 781 (1989).[↑]
71. Radovac, “Mic Check,” 35.[↑]
72. Radovac, “Mic Check,” 34, 38.[↑]
73. Ward, 491 US at 782.[↑]
74. Ward, 491 US at 803.[↑]
75. These implications exceed the scope of the present article and deserve treatment in their own right, which we hope to develop elsewhere.[↑]
76. Valdés, “Spaces of Sounds”; McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).[↑]
77. Valdés, “Spaces of Sounds.”[↑]
78. Jodi Rios, Black Lives and Spatial Matters (Cornell University Press, 2020), 2.[↑]
79. Zuazu, “Acoustic Hailing Devices.”[↑]
80. Randy E. Barnett, “Compensation and Rights in the Liberal Conception of Justice,” in Compensatory Justice, ed. John W. Chapman (NYU Press, 1991).[↑]