Cleveland Police said that two officers were injured during protests.
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While the city self-insures its own property and employees, the extra policy will apply to any damage of public property, out-of-town police and their equipment, and any other legal claims made by people arrested during the four-day GOP convention. In the run-up to the convention, some law enforcement authorities had feared hundreds of arrests every day.
Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party said the group organized the burning of the American flag as a “political statement about the crimes of the American empire”.
Groups included anarchists, anti-Muslim protesters and Bikers for Trump.
Protesters and demonstrators themselves numbered in the hundreds, not the thousands as had been hoped.
Gone were protesters yelling into bullhorns and a stage set up for demonstrators was empty for the first time all week.
Jesse Gonzalez, of Lakewood, a Cleveland suburb, carried a rifle on Public Square while wearing a camouflage-style “Make America Great Again” hat.
Overhead shots from the Cleveland police helicopter broadcast over Periscope showed sparse crowds.
Ciaccia said officers were investigating and urging people not to take stickers from people they don’t know.
But after 2-plus days of RNC events and protests, there have been far fewer arrests than expected.
Meanwhile, organizers of the flag-burning denied on Thursday that the man holding the American flag was on fire and said police used that as an excuse to move in. Hashime said he wants to become a police officer someday.
Chaotic protests around the arena housing the Republican National Convention are making it hard for some delegates to get inside.
A message was left with Cleveland city officials seeking comment.
The move came after several unconfirmed reports of people trying to poke officers with syringes that eventually proved to be unfounded.
Police have formed a barricade using their bikes between different groups.
The fears of bloodshed were stoked by the ambush killings of eight police officers earlier this month in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and by Ohio’s open-carry law, which allows gun owners to carry their weapons in plain sight.
Police are showing patience, looking less like an army and riding bicycles, which they’ve used as shields to separate groups with opposing points of view.
One predicted the RNC in Cleveland would make the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention look like “a fourth grade slap fight”.
Trump has said he will build a wall along the 3,200 kilometer USA border with Mexico, a proposal that Kelly Welch, another supporter from Wadsworth, Ohio, said “is the same as building a fence around your yard”.
Police Chief Calvin Williams said a protester whose trousers caught fire got defensive when a police officer tried to put out the blaze.
Many say business is even worse than in normal weeks.
A lot of downtown offices told their employees to take vacation during the convention or to work from home.
More than a dozen protesters and Donald Trump supporters had said that a group planned to burn a United States 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.
Multiple people with their hands cuffed behind them were detained by police. Sunsara Taylor says members are being illegally detained to prevent them from protesting. She says the group will hold another protest Thursday.
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The anti-Trump forces are planning an afternoon parade and an evening rally Thursday, the day Trump is scheduled to accept the Republican nomination for president.
