A day of civil disobedience that saw several arrests in Ferguson ended Monday with some protesters throwing rocks and bottles at police.
The St. Louis County police said frozen water bottles were thrown at officers, prompting them to order the crowd to disperse or face arrest.
"Safety, our top priority, is now compromised. This is no longer a peaceful protest. Participants are now unlawfully assembled," the department tweeted. About 23 arrests were made late Monday and early Tuesday, police said.
Police Chief Jon Belmar tried to de-escalate the tension by speaking with some demonstrators, who then moved from the street to the sidewalks.
However, others seethed as word spread that police had arrested a 12-year-old girl. Police contended she was 18, citing her ID.
More controversy arose as well over a pair of arrests made last year in the wake of protests over Michael Brown's shooting death: those of The Washington Post's Wesley Lowery and The Huffington's Post Ryan Reilly, who were briefly detained after being told they were trespassing as they worked in a McDonald's along the protest route.
St. Louis County on Monday, 363 days after their arrests and two days shy of the statute of limitations, charged the reporters with trespassing and interfering with a police officer.
Both news outlets cast the arrests as gross First Amendment violations at the time, and they maintained that theme in Tuesday's responses. Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, called the charges "outrageous," while HuffPo's Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim said it was police who committed crimes by assaulting reporters during "violent arrests." The National Association of Black Journalists called the charges "a direct assault on the free exercise of the First Amendment."
Video posted on social media showed Reilly having another run-in with police early Tuesday. In it, Reilly and an officer are seen tussling -- Reilly tweeted that the officer "tried to grab me and snatched my press badge" -- before Reilly pulls away, putting his hands behind his back and saying, "I'm media. I'm media. I'm media." Reilly was covering demonstrators who took to the streets in spite of a heavy police presence, scurried away, regrouped and returned.
Among the crowd were a handful of heavily armed members of an organization called the Oath Keepers. A man out on patrol described the group as constitutionalists who were hired to protect reporters for InfoWars.com, a website run by radio host Alex Jones, who has questioned everything from the moon landing to 9/11.
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