n the '70's New Haven's black communities were overrun by drugs and black-on-black crime.

It was the new slavery.

It negated the protection many blacks felt had been obtained from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Other blacks felt that since the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) never seemed to arrest any of the major wholesale suppliers of drugs coming into the country, that the government was in cahoots with the real drug bosses, and the new laws were simply a diversion.

The attack on the black community had shifted.

A century of lynching, riots and erosion of legal protection for blacks, which assaulted the black community from outside, was being replaced by the poisonous effects of drugs and black-on-black crime from within.

By the '70's, the drive for black social change barely had a pulse.

The movement for social change had started in the early '60's with Martin Luther King's philosophy of passive resistance, taking what he considered "the moral high ground" in the face of violence and repression. It had given way to the militancy of the late '60's and the desire by Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party and other militants to create a black revolution "by any means necessary," including force.

By the early '70's, many seminal black leaders were either dead (Martin Luther King,Jr and Malcolm X), in jail (Black Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Seale), or fugitives (H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis and Black Panther Eldredge Cleaver). The fight for all too many black people became to keep drug addicts and robbers from stealing their money and taking their lives and to prevent their children from becoming those monsters terrifying the community.

In the '70's, my father developed a unique perspective on crime and law enforcement.

• Controversial police actions should be reviewed by a citizens committee.

• Half of the six police commissioners should be elected, instead of appointed

•There should be open hearings for charges of police brutality