the article is titled: “Maximum Force, Minimum Reason.” It covers the event at a banquet where people were arrested. The opening paragraph begins:
“If there is one lesson which should have been learned by everyone in recent years, it is the danger of over-reaction to the activity of protesting groups. in case after documented case, citizen and official over-reaction turned a minor demonstration into a major disorder. Yet, Thursday night when a handful of welfare mothers and one civil rights activist did “their thing” at a banquet of state welfare workers, the Des Moines police reacted with the same old formula of maximum force and minimum reason. ….The demonstrators interrupted a banquet, to a minor degree, by complaining about the inadequacy of welfare payments and asking for contributions from those attending the $6-a-plate dinner. The welfare workers said they didn’t find the mothers disrupting and didn’t call the police. However, the manager of the Hotel Savery, where the meeting was held, said the chairman of the conference asked for help to stop the disruption. An off-duty policeman, hired to work for another group holding a meeting at the hotel, called the police. Some 20 officers were sent. … The police unwittingly threw up new barriers to human rights progress in Des Moines and, in the process, made their own jobs more difficult….”