SAN FRANCISCO — Organizers of a conservative "Freedom Rally" planned in San Francisco for Saturday abruptly announced they were cancelling the event on Friday afternoon, citing the potential for violence.

"We have a lot of respect for the citizens in San Francisco and at the end of the day we wanted people to be safe," Joey Gibson, one of organizers of the Patriot Prayer event, said in a Facebook Live presentation with other organizers.

Instead, organizers said they would hold a press conference at 2:00 p.m. local time in Alamo Square Park, the well-known San Francisco park that fronts on to the iconic painted lady Victorian houses.

No permits have been requested or issued for Alamo Square for the weekend, San Francisco mayor Ed Lee said in a statement. The police department will maintain an enhanced presence at the park and in the surrounding neighborhoods, he said.

"The San Francisco Police Department and our city's public safety agencies are prepared for any contingencies and spontaneous events," Lee said.

“This rally in Alamo Square is illegal and in the heart of a residential neighborhood, and I am deeply concerned it will lead to violence, particularly given how close Alamo Square is to the counter-protest at Civic Center. As a matter of public safety, it cannot be allowed to happen,” said California state senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco).

Gibson said he believed no permit was required because he was not holding a rally, "just going to talk with media," he told USA TODAY. "If they want to arrest me for talking to media then so be it."

Earlier in the week, Gibson had said he planned the protest rally to discuss publicly what he feels are fundamental problems in the nation and to emphasize the value of and need for free speech and freedom.

“We purposely do this because we want protesters to show up so they can hear us. Hopefully some of these groups will consider just coming in to the rally and hear us out,” he said.

Given the violence and bloodshed after the Charlottesville, Va., "Unite The Right" rally two weeks ago that left one woman dead, and confrontations during a "free speech" rally in Boston last weekend, city officials had been braced for possible violence between organizers and counterprotesters.

A large swath of the city’s northern beach front was to be closed to traffic, bus routes cancelled or shifted and traffic blocked. As many as 12 counterprotests had been planned. Friday evening it was unclear which, if any, of them would take place.

At a gathering at noon on Friday at San Francisco City Hall, Mayor Edwin Lee and city leaders celebrated what Lee called "San Francisco values" of compassion, love and inclusiveness. Speaker after speaker urged the crowd to avoid Chrissy Field, the planned site of the Patriot Prayer rally, and instead rally and protest elsewhere in the city.

The overall message was to protest from afar.

City Supervisor Jeff Sheehy, a former AIDS activist with ACT UP!, said that when he was with ACT UP, the chant was "Act up! Fight back."

"Today, our chant must be, 'Act up! Love back," he told the crowd.

In a text message to USA TODAY, Gibson said that the event was cancelled "due to Nancy Pelosi and Mayor Lee trying to incite a riot by calling us a white supremacist group."

However the overall tone In the Facebook Live announcement, Gibson said that politicians and the media had branded the group as being white supremacists "and it's bringing in tons of extremists."

"It just seems like a huge setup so we decided that we were going to take the opportunity to not fall into that trap," he said.