CLEVELAND _ For the first time this week, police threatened a group of demonstrators with arrest, after a rowdy crowd, some wearing masks, sprinted through the streets of downtown Cleveland in a cat-and-mouse game with officers on bicycles.
The protest, Tuesday afternoon, which seemed to have splintered from a larger march that started at Public Square earlier in the day, ended shortly before 8 p.m. when officers declared an unlawful assembly just outside the city's convention center.
Police Chief Calvin Williams skipped the police department's nightly news briefing to help break up the rally, conversing with protesters, even bantering with a man wearing a bandana who insisted the police had violated the Constitution by asking the demonstrators to go home.
"We're free to go wherever we want!" the man yelled at Williams.
"You're free to go that way," the police chief replied, pointing away from the convention center.
No one was arrested, though protesters defied police barricades and directions several times, at one point sprinting through a parking garage to evade officers on bicycles.
The demonstration marked the end to a more chaotic, but still largely nonviolent, second day of protests at the convention.
A minor melee broke out in Public Square around 4 p.m., when a shoving match erupted near where Alex Jones, the far-right political commentator and founder of InfoWars.com, was chanting through a bullhorn.
Williams was bumped into during the fracas, but no one was arrested.
In the hour that followed, a number of different groups, including the Westboro Baptist Church and the Revolutionary Communist Party, held dueling demonstrations in the area, but police on bicycles kept opposing groups away from one another.
