NEW YORK – Protesters predicted a wave of lawsuits against the city over the police crackdown on demonstrations during the Republican National Convention.

“There will undeniably be lawsuits about the sweeps and about the detention,” Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union said Friday.

The NYCLU, National Lawyers Guild and civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel said some police tactics unfairly stifled dissent.

The focus of most lawsuits will likely be the allegation that cops slowed down the release of prisoners to keep demonstrators off the street during President Bush’s speech Thursday.

“The question is whether the long delays were part of the plan,” Lieberman said.

City brass defended the cops Friday. “We expected our police officers to perform with restraint and professionalism,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. “That’s easy to say but sometimes harder to achieve in the face of provocation and long hours of duty.

“But here again, our expectations were met and exceeded by the extraordinarily high performance of our members of the department.”

Kelly did not address complaints that dozens of innocent people were wrongfully arrested as they walked near protests when police used orange nets to sweep up everyone.

But Mayor Michael Bloomberg, on his WABC-AM radio show, seemed to imply that arrests of innocent people were inevitable.

“You can’t arrest 1,800 people without having somebody in the middle who shouldn’t have been arrested. That’s what the courts are there to find out afterwards,” he said.

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