If you want to use specifically NumPy testing, then you can use numpy.testing.assert_array_equal together with numpy.testing.assert_raises for the opposite result. For example:
assert_raises(AssertionError, assert_array_equal, array_1, array_2)
Also there is numpy.testing.utils.assert_array_compare (it is used by numpy.testing.assert_array_equal), but I don’t see it documented anywhere, so use with caution. This one will check that every element is different, so I guess this is not your use case:
import operator
assert_array_compare(operator.__ne__, array_1, array_2)