Many demonstrations this week here have been hugely outnumbered by police and reporters on scene.
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“This is a lie made up to justify the suppression of protected speech”, Sunsara Taylor, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, wrote on Twitter.
Protesters will march across the Hope Memorial Bridge into downtown Cleveland.
Police pushed into the center of the crowd and began moving the core protesters, who continued screaming and chanting while they were handcuffed, searched and detained.
When demonstrators did not comply with dispersal orders, arrests were made for charges including failure to disperse and resisting arrest. Police say they intervened in the flag burning when one of the group’s members – Joey Johnson, who lit a flag on fire at the 1984 in RNC and won a Supreme Court case that declared flag burning protected speech – lit himself on fire.
Police officers told delegates Wednesday to line up on a yellow line in the street and ordered all others to leave the area.
Dramatic images captured the moment Gregory Lee Johnson set a flag he was holding alight, before the fire quickly spread to his trousers, during a demonstration that blocked delegates from getting into the convention on Wednesday.
The man whose three-decade-old protest led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision finding flag burning constitutional was arrested for burning a flag at the Republican National Convention. “Police descended on everyone, and some people were arrested”, Dix said following the arrests.
Police officers fight with the crowd as they try to make arrests at East 4th and Prospect.
Police Chief Calvin Williams defended his officers and said the arrests went according to plan. He said these few groups are the only ones causing problems while the majority of demonstrators are exercising First Amendment rights and trying to get a message across.
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.
Others held a banner saying, “Wall Off Trump”.
No one was arrested at the Lake Avenue house, and Anderson said police and agents never entered the home.
A small group protesting Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall between the USA and Mexico is making its own wall in downtown Cleveland.
Police said two officers suffered minor injuries during the incident. The first is whether Revolution Books Cleveland had a permit to protest exactly where it did.
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A total of 20 people were arrested since Monday. He also said police have not confiscated weapons from any protesters, although all prohibited items from screws to tent stakes and gas masks have been confiscated.
