About 50 Occupy Phoenix protesters descended on the Fourth Avenue Jail in Phoenix to support the 45 demonstrators arrested early Sunday. "Bankers get a bailout and we get jail," they chanted before marching back to Cesar Chavez Plaza on Sunday afternoon.

Later that evening, about 150 demonstrators crowded the sidewalks at the plaza under the watch of police officers. Three demonstrators were arrested when they refused to get off the street after the plaza's closing hour.

In the early hours of Sunday, Phoenix police arrested 45 Occupy Phoenix protesters who refused to leave downtown's Margaret T. Hance Park at its 10:30 p.m. closing time, according to Phoenix Police Sgt. Trent Crump.

Marking the first time the group staged a demonstration in Phoenix, more than 1,000 members of a movement that decries corporate greed among other issues demonstrated at Cesar Chavez Plaza in downtown Phoenix before moving to the park.

But unlike in cities such as New York, where Occupy Wall Street protesters have been given the okay since last month to camp out on a privately owned parcel, Phoenix riot police forced protestors out of the park and arrested those who wouldn't go, Crump said.

"Most of those arrested were passive in nature and no injuries were reported to either officers or demonstrators," Crump said.

The arrests capped a day that saw more than 1,000 people packed Cesar Chavez Plaza in downtown Phoenix to protest what they view as abuses by banks and other major corporations.

The protest was an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement that spread Saturday to cities such as Raleigh, Denver, Seattle, Chicago and Tucson, where several hundred people rallied at Military Plaza Park.

Like the New York crowds, Occupy Phoenix protesters championed diverse causes, united by grievances against corporate greed and political influence.

The targets of protesters' anger ranged from Washington, D.C.'s partisan politics to the abuse of children by Catholic priests.

Protesters blame these problems on wealthy corporate CEOs and what they termed big businesses' lack of compassion for the "lower 99 percent" of the population.

Earlier Saturday, the protest went smoothly, Crump said.

"There were large crowds with no known injuries or arrest. The plaza had cleared out late in the afternoon, prior to its 6 p.m. closing time," Crump said of the earlier gathering. Protestors Saturday afternoon marched to Hance park, in part because of its later hours of operation, which are posted as 10:30 p.m.

"As the park closing hour passed many of the demonstrators refused to leave," Crump said.

Detectives from the Phoenix Police Community Response Squad personally urged group members to leave quickly. More requests made by ground and by air.

"However, a large group remained and refused to leave the park," Crump said.

Before midnight, Field Force Team moved in to clear the protesters, whose chants and other loud noises prompted police reports, Crump said.

The team formed a line and moved across the park, arrested and pushing the protesters ahead of the line, Trump said. Sprinklers came on and many demonstrators moved north, Crump said.

As of this morning, 45 arrests had taken place for criminal trespass, a Class 3 misdemeanor, Crump said.

"Most of those arrested were passive in nature and no injuries were reported to either officers or demonstrators," Crump said.

Despite the arrests protesters vowed to return today in force, but by early Sunday just a few clustered near the Cesar Chavez Plaza.

The gathering was primarily organized through social media, and the movement has no official spokesman.

"Non-violence is really good practically," said Carolyn Vesecky, a trainer with the Phoenix Nonviolence TruthForce. "We have a lot of passion, but we need to direct it in the most constructive means."

About a dozen musicians played instruments, sang and rapped revolutionary lyrics at various times.

When they closed the park, the police flew their chopper past midnight, and by 1:30 had pushed everybody out of the park. Protesters said that Phoenix Assistant Manager Cavazos made the problem worse by pushing the protesters out of the park into neighborhoods in the middle of the night.

By Sunday afternoon, the crowd at Cesar Chavez Plaza had swelled to a couple hundred people, some of them yelling, "We love you," to motorists driving on Washington Avenue and waving signs that read, "We are the 99 percent," "End the Corpocracy," and, "Money is not speech. Corporations are not people," a reference to the controversial Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United.

Several wore T-shirts with the epigram, "Think: It's not illegal yet."

Among the demonstrators was Dave Reilly, 47, of Chicago, who had been in Occupy protests in New York and Chicago before he came to Phoenix.

Reilly had been a training coordinator for an electronics corporation but lost his job in 2007 because the company switched to less-expensive online training.

"I've been looking for work; it's a black hole," said Reilly, who has worked part-time jobs including pedaling a rickshaw, cleaning toilets and working as a lifeguard.

He worked construction in Phoenix for two months but quit after he didn't get a paycheck.

"They shrugged and said, 'When we get paid, you get paid.' People are so desperate, employers are taking huge advantage of the situation. They can replace you; somebody else will come along and do the job for free."

Still, he carried a sign saying "I (heart) USA" explaining his sign by saying, "It's the greatest country in the world; it's just a little bit mismanaged."

Among the protesters was Ondi Scibilia. She said she had been living in Santan Valley, but her home is being short-saled, so she's staying with a friend in Goodyear.

Her green-cleaning/concierege company was doing well until the economy tanked. It folded in December 2008.

Scibilia grew vegetables and goats for cheese on her land, but her husband lost his job with a cement company in December 2009, and in 2010, their marriage ended.

She has turned in hundreds of job applications, which have prompted only two phone calls and one interview.

"I still have hope," she said. "Without hope, I wouldn't be breathing."

Sylvia Trainor of Peoria is two weeks away from losing her house to auction. Until she lost her well-paid engineer husband to cancer, the couple paid still paid the mortgage from their savings.

She's in deep debt because of his cancer treatments but says she can't get coverage under AHCCCS, the state's Medicaid system, not even for her son who has Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism.

"All I have is Social Security," she said. "If I pay the mortgage, I don't have enough money for food. I get food boxes, but that's not enough with four children at home."

When she loses her home, she wants to keep her family together, so she expects to pitch a tent in a park.

"The only thing holding me together is my faith," she said.

Also at the protest Sunday night was Peter Szayer of Mesa, who had just spent 18 hours in the Fourth Avenue Jail after being arrested for being in Hance Park after it closed.

"It put things in perspective how things are run here in Arizona in the jail system," said Szayer, who was a college student but had to quit because he couldn't afford school.

He now works as a caregiver to physically and mentally challenged people at Tungland Corp. in Phoenix.

He said he was put in pink handcuffs, had the option of sleeping on the floor or a concrete bench, and was fed once - bread, peanut butter and two small oranges.

"I could totally tell they did not care about us," he said. "They didn't care how big or small our crime was. I was sitting next to a guy (not one of the protesters) who was bleeding all over the place."

He said detention officers made fun of him and his fellow protesters, taunting them by saying, "Are you having fun occupying this jail?"

Szayer said he faced the prospect of being homeless Sunday night because his backpack containing his car keys, cellphones and ID had been impounded and he couldn't retrieve them until Monday.

He was concerned because he said he needed an ID to get them.

"It's something I'll have to deal with tomorrow," he said Sunday night.