GOP convention ends quietly with few arrests after protests

The protests coincided with the 2016 Republican National Convention, and they primarily occurred just a few blocks from the arena where the event took place.

The unit “proved to be particularly invaluable during the convention”, city officials said Friday, adding that Cleveland police will maintain the bikes and reinstitute the patrols in neighborhoods in the future.

The flag-burning brought to 23 the number of people arrested since the start of the convention, far fewer than many had feared.

The convention represents a stern test for the Cleveland police force: Fears of violence are running high during this mean summer of racially charged bloodshed in the US and extremist attacks overseas.

A massive police presence helped keep the protests largely under control, said Eric Ferrero, an Amnesty International deputy executive director who helped oversee teams of observers in Cleveland.

The demonstrations that many thought would end in pitched battles between police and protesters turned at times into carnival-like scenes, with bongo players and with protesters dressed as nuns on stilts.

There were tense moments and some angry words over the four days as anarchists, anti-Muslim protesters and pro-capitalist groups congregated on the square.

Multiple people with their hands cuffed behind them have been detained by police in the most chaotic protest to hit the National Republican Convention.

Protesters argue in Public Square on Thursday, July 21, 2016, in Cleveland, during the final day of the Republican convention.

Cleveland police tweeted saying they don’t know for certain if the sticker contributed to the irritation.

Protesters and demonstrators themselves numbered in the hundreds, not the thousands as had been hoped.

The two officers who were assaulted had minor injuries, with one bleeding from his elbow, AP reported.

In explaining how the melee unfolded, police chief said that a protester whose trousers caught fire resisted when a police officer tried to put out the blaze. The charges against those arrested included failure to disperse, resisting arrest and felonious assault on a police officer.

Carl Dix, a representative of Revolutionary Communist Party, said the group organized the burning of the American flag as a “political statement about the crimes of the American empire”.

This story has been corrected to show protests were Wednesday, not Thursday, and to show police say that a fire extinguisher was used, not pepper spray.

“We had big groups that said they were coming in that got dwindled down to nothing”, said Larry Bresler, lead organizer of a Stop Poverty Now rally.

“We’re building the wall that he asked for”, said Brenda Perez of Nashville, Tenn., and the group Mijente, a Latinx – gender neutral – social-justice group.

“We’re still out there, we’re still vigilant, to make sure we finish this day and the last day tomorrow on a positive note”, Police Chief Calvin Williams said at a media briefing Wednesday evening.

More than a dozen protesters and Donald Trump supporters had said that a group planned to burn a U.S. flag, and officers and medics with fire extinguishers stood at the ready a block away on Euclid and E. 4th Street in the minutes before the incident kicked off. Cleveland police denied accusations by protesters and witnesses that they used pepper spray. Until this incident, only five people had been arrested.

The melee outside an entrance to the convention arena on Wednesday was the most turbulent protest of the week.