A reporter for the Huffington Post recounts his experience being arrested while covering the recent

(14 Aug 2014) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: apus015527

Police on Thursday defended the use of tear gas and smoke bombs to repel protesters after another night of chaos in a St. Louis suburb following the shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown.
The police chiefs of Ferguson and St. Louis County said Wednesday that race relations were the top priority in the town, where a white police officer fatally shot the black teen. Authorities have vowed to reach across the racial, economic and generational divide in a community in search of answers. A meeting was scheduled for Thursday between civil rights leaders and police.
Meanwhile, two reporters said they were detained by police for not clearing out quickly enough from a McDonald's where they were working, near the protests but away from the more volatile areas. The two, who work for The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, were released without any charges. Both say they were assaulted but not seriously hurt.
"The officer who had his hand on the back my neck slammed my head into the door and then wouldn't refuse to identify himself by badge number and name in the presence of several other officers I asked over a dozen times," said Ryan Reilly, a justice reporter for the Huffington Post.
Officers from multiple departments in riot gear and in military equipment have clashed nightly with protesters, who chant, "Hands up, don't shoot." Protesters faced heavily armed police who at times trained weapons on them from armored trucks.
Residents in Ferguson have complained about the police response that began with the use of dogs for crowd control soon after Brown's shooting - a tactic that for some invoked the civil rights protests from a half-century ago. The county police force took over, leading both the investigation of Brown's shooting and the subsequent attempts to keep the peace at the smaller city's request.

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