A spokesman for the group that organized a 10,000-person protest that has resulted in 500 arrests in Washington this week says Capitol Police “have been the model of professionalism and respect.”

“The Capitol Police are the best-trained police forces, especially when it comes to that stuff, in the world,” Democracy Spring Communications Coordinator Peter Callahan told The Stream on Day 2 of the planned week-long protest against what Callahan called “big money in politics.”

He said that his group  was treated fairly “and there were no clashes between police and protesters, there was no incident of any kind. Today, we heard a bunch of the supporters, and people that ended up being arrested, were chanting, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you’ to the Capitol Police. We know they’re doing their jobs, they have a job to do, and they have families to feed, just like every other American, and we respect the h*** out of them. They’re great people.”

“We’re thankful that they are so good at doing their jobs. We’re trying to make it as easy for them as we possibly can.”

The Democracy Spring protest are planned to last from April 11 through April 18, after a 10-day march from Philadelphia to the nation’s capital. Organizers say their key issues include opposition to voter ID laws, money in politics and full support for the Voting Rights Act.

In recent years, liberal protests across the country by Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter groups have led to clashes with police. Democracy Spring, however, has a policy of nonviolence that Callahan says they take seriously.

“We went out of our way in this situation to make sure we wouldn’t have interlopers who were here to provoke stuff. That’s not what we’re about,” Callahan told The Stream.

One conservative who walked with the protestors was Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition. Known for his pro-life principles, which have led to his being arrested 70 times for civil disobedience on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, Mahoney told The Stream that he participated “to speak out against big money corruption in the political process.”

While he declined to be civilly disobedient with the hundreds who were arrested on April 11, Mahoney said “what happened to them was not abnormal,” and said that while there is often a liberal outcry about police treatment, “that’s not really the case on Capitol Hill.”