Police and Community Relations in the Wake of the War on Drugs: A Historical Perspective

Mural outside of the 22nd Police District, North Philadelphia (2010)

In the wake of the murders of NYPD Officers Liu and Ramos, there are a lot of fingers being pointed at protesters and activists for somehow causing these killings by exercising their right to express disapproval in police actions which they believe to be wrong.  The message of these protesters and activists has been misconstrued in several ways: that all cops are racist, that all cops are killers, that cops are evil.  While a good deal of this misunderstanding, I think, comes from a sort of automatic process in which we translate “criticisms I don’t agree with” into “violently negative statements about everything I hold dear,” I also think there’s a more significant lack of understanding about what we mean when we say that policing in this country is prone to institutional racism.

Perhaps a historical perspective would help.  Some has been offered already: people, of course, recalling lynchings and segregation and police turning hoses on Civil Rights demonstrators in the Sixties.  All relevant.  But I think a more immediate progenitor of our current situation – the deep divide of distrust between inner-city communities and police, and the frequently brutal tactics used to enforce the law in these communities – is the War on Drugs and its legacy.

The War on Drugs, riding on a wave of popular hysteria, legitimized and institutionalized police procedures that target non-white minorities and the underclass.  Even as our drug policies slowly start to shift from the more draconian measures of the past, policing in the inner-city continues to display a militarized mindset, and people in those communities continue to view cops as an occupying army.  This is not an accident.  You don’t declare war on something, and then get surprised when people start drawing battle lines.

I realize I’m stating the obvious here.  But in all of the arguments I’ve read, no one’s provided a clear schematic of how, exactly, these two phenomena are related.  So that’s what I’m going to try to do here.

Fells Point, Baltimore (2007)

Part I: The War

Drugs were part of our counterculture long before the Sixties (and, indeed, we’d already racked up a notable history of drug penalties targeting non-whites by that point in history), but it was during that time that recreational drug use began to gain wider notice and acceptance.  Particularly, they became a trademark of rebelliousness and independence among America’s youth – and you know how much we freak out about new, dangerous teenage fads.  Combined with increased reports of heroin addiction (including among Vietnam veterans), national fear of drugs began to build.

In 1971, Nixon officially declared a “war on drugs,” implementing tactics that continue to characterize narcotics policing today: mandatory minimum sentencing and no-knock warrants.  Mandatory minimums prescribe a required amount of jail time for a certain offense – in this case, drug trafficking, drug importation or exportation, or possession with intent to distribute, on a scale based on the amount in the individual’s possession at the time of arrest.  No-knock warrants are exactly what they sound like: warrants that allow the police to enter a residence without first knocking, ringing the doorbell, or otherwise making themselves known.  These warrants provide police with the element of surprise when raiding stash houses, preventing dealers from disposing of drugs or other evidence (or, as I’m sure is a constant concern, rallying themselves to fight back).

These tactics boast a host of problems in and of themselves, so let’s look at that, briefly.  Mandatory minimums are, by nature, inflexible.  They can’t be tailored to individuals or situations (one of those things that the American people is totally against when it happens to Jean Valjean, but totally for when it happens to 17-year-old “Peanut” on Ocean and Stegman).  While standardized sentencing often makes sense, if only to streamline the judicial process and prevent disparities in sentencing, it’s more problematic than it appears.  For one thing, it doesn’t real prevent sentencing disparities – judges have to follow those restrictions in handing down sentences, sure, but power really lies in the hands of the prosecutors.  It’s entirely up to the prosecutor’s discretion what charges they bring (evidence permitting, of course – and even then, there are exceptions), meaning that they decide whether to charge a client with a mandatory minimum offense… or not.  Often, these decisions are drawn along racial lines.  A 2013 study in the Yale Law Journal found that prosecutors are twice as likely to pursue mandatory minimums for blacks as for whites charged with the same offense.

In the case of no-knock warrants, we see one of the earliest (in the drug war, anyway) examples of the paramilitary policing so widely criticized in Ferguson, MO, this summer.  Approaching a building undetected, busting down doors with weapons drawn, shouting: this is a military operation, a ground assault.  People on the other end of these warrants have, often, responded accordingly.  There have been numerous cases of civilians – innocent of whatever suspicions justified the warrant in the first place – thinking that their home was under attack, attempting to defend themselves with those Constitutionally-approved firearms we love so much, and being gunned down by police.  A quick Google search will provide more examples, but as a taste, here’s the story of Kathryn Johnson, a 92-year-old woman killed during a botched drug raid (and the subsequent attempt at a cover-up by Atlanta PD).

In order to really understand the War on Drugs and its effects, however, we need to look at where it was being fought. Because, like all wars, it both marred and, in a sense, defined the ground it was waged on.

North Philadelphia (2009)

Part II: The Battlefield

The War on Drugs began as the narcotics trade was really gaining a foothold in the black inner-city.  Just a couple of decades prior, major American cities saw the advent of high-rise project towers and increasing white flight to the suburbs, both of which would have a major role in defining the inner-city.  Construction of high-rises exploded after World War II, in order to house workers flooding into the cities to fill jobs created by the post-war manufacturing boom.  At first, many of these developments were mixed-race (or, at the very least, lightly segregated).  Over time, however, whites began to leave the city for the suburbs (often in order to escape integration, as in the case of Levittown and its descendents).  Desegregation increased this exodus, until many densely urban areas were majority black or brown.  Manufacturers, industries, and, consequently, jobs pulled up stakes soon after.  Minority communities – already economically disadvantaged by racist hiring practices – fell deeper into destitution.  The high-rises, once convenient residences for hundreds of workers, became concentrated zones of intense poverty.  Property values dropped, as did the ability to pay taxes, along with a comorbid dip in the quality of education and social services.

The police in these neighborhoods were, at the time, almost exclusively white.  Brutality and racism were common, as was anger from the community.  In 1964, Harlem, Chicago, Philadelphia*, and Jersey City all saw riots in response to instances of police brutality.

It was in this climate of anger, desperation, and shrinking opportunities that the drug trade established itself.  Again, drugs were already being sold in the black inner-city at this time, but the Sixties and Seventies saw a real expansion in black control of these enterprises (as in the case of Frank Lucas, who famously used his US Army connections to cut out the middle man and import heroin directly from Southeast Asia).  To borrow one of my favorite David Simon phrases, by the early Eighties, the narcotics trade was the only factory in the inner-city that was still hiring.  And there was certainly demand to meet the supply: what started as rebellion in the Sixties and partying in the Seventies soon became just drugs for drugs’ sake: drug use as a way to deal with depression and hopelessness, to give dead-end lives some spark, not to mention to feed the gnawing of addiction.  There were, as Simon’s The Corner and The Wire laments, rules at one point – a vain attempt to put some veneer of order on what was essentially industrialized suicide, but still, rules nonetheless.  Kids weren’t employed in the drug trade.  Violence was most often carried out with the same bloodless calculus that characterized Mafia killings – a series of approvals and justifications, a general (if not overwhelming) interest in avoiding collateral damage.

And then comes crack.  Crack: potent, highly addictive, and cheap.  Imagine if everyone on your block suddenly had the ability to start manufacturing and selling iPhones.  Prices would go down, sure.  So would quality control.  And competition would just go up.  Crack changed the entire face of the inner-city drug trade.  Now you didn’t need a serious connection: you could get a few friends together, buy a package from some guy down from New York for the weekend, and start selling by nightfall.  The drug’s potency meant more addicts – and more desperate addicts.  People willing to put up with more kinds of abuse in order to get what they needed; not to mention people willing to go to more extreme measures to do the same.  More and more young people got into the game, meaning an increase in reckless behavior (to borrow another great Simon line, a fourteen-year-old drug dealer is still only fourteen).  Crime and violence skyrocketed.

The advent of crack whipped public fears about drugs into an even greater frenzy.  And the nexus of those fears was the black inner-city.  Under Reagan the War on Drugs intensified, along with an explosion in mass incarceration for drug offenses -- adding one more factor, along with addiction, violence, and a dysfunctional government assistance program, that devastated black families and economic hopes.  The poverty that made the ghetto and the drug trade possible in the first place compounded, dug in its heels.  In many ways, the drug war worsened the threat it was supposed to alleviate.

Look at any contemporary cultural depiction of the inner-city from the Eighties and Nineties, and you’ll see a lawless shadow land, full of sadistic gangsters and constant gunfire.  This was how we saw these neighborhoods, and how we demanded that they be policed.  Any arguments about the history of racial exclusion, about the effects of compounded poverty and hopelessness, were swept away with appeals to “personal responsibility.”  The personal failings of a 17-year-old corner boy, in other words, somehow wipe away the decades, centuries, of institutional failings that contributed to him standing on that corner in the first place.

It’s at this point in history that we develop our national myth of the “welfare queen,” that we indulge in exaggerated reports of “crack babes” and wild-eyed, soulless crack addicts.  Conveniently, this is also the peak of our panic over HIV/AIDS, providing us with a modern-day leprosy to cringe away from.  As the situation of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens became worse and worse, we responded at first with fear, and eventually contempt.  It’s an attitude we hold onto today: a righteous fear that allows us to think of the black inner-city as a “jungle,” to call an entire group of people “thugs” or “animals” and then claim that it’s not about race.  It makes us totally understanding of violent police tactics: It’s the only thing these animals understand.  They see mercy as a sign of weakness and they’ll rip your throat out.

We viewed the inner-city as an enemy country, so the police approached it as such.  Those involved in the narcotics trade responded in kind.  The work of police became more dangerous as violence increased, contributing to what we often perceive as itchy trigger fingers: the idea that if you give an assailant half-an-inch, they will, undoubtedly, kill you.  This idea responds to a very real danger in the everyday life of police.  It’s also led to many instances of brutality, and wrongful deaths.

And after so many years of exclusion and oppression, even those citizens with no ties to crime were distrustful, and sometimes hostile, to police.  This distrust led to a general unwillingness to assist in any police investigations, especially because it was clear that the police could do very little to protect witnesses from reprisals in their own neighborhoods.  This, of course, made police work – especially murder investigations – exponentially more difficult.  Frustrations built on both sides.

Camden, NJ (2014)

Part III: Our War

The War on Drugs capitalized on these fears and frustrations.  It emphasized arrests, because that’s what creates numbers.  Arrest numbers are something you can put on a graph, a spreadsheet, a press release.  They’re comforting, because they give the illusion that something is being done about crime.  Consequently, the cop on the street can show his shift sergeant that he’s doing his job, the shift sergeant can account for himself to his commander, his commander can justify the retention of his job to the commissioner, and the commissioner can do the same to the mayor, who in turn uses the numbers to ingratiate himself to the voters.  However, these arrests don’t actually have any preventative or structural effects on crime, for the simple reason that most of them are street-level arrests: that is, someone standing on the corner selling drugs, or someone holding a stash.  These folks are generally bit-players in the drug game.  It’s the equivalent of discovering that McDonald’s the company has been secretly using cat meat in its Chicken McNuggets to cut down on costs, and arresting the kid at the drive-thru window at the nearest store.  These arrests don’t actually interrupt the business of narcotics, because street-level dealers are easily replaceable.  But they’re also the easiest arrests to make, which sates the brass and city hall’s need for increased numbers.  Arresting major figures in drug organizations takes time, money, and patience that voters usually don’t respond kindly to.

Consequently, we get street-level arrests and overcrowded prisons.  In 1980, there were 50,000 people incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses; by 1997, there were over 400,000.  In September of 2013, there were 98,200 federal inmates (about 51% of the federal prison population) incarcerated for drug crimes, and 210,200 in state prisons in 2012.  These inmates are, disproportionately, people of color.  Blacks comprise nearly one-third of those arrested for drug crimes, despite using drugs at comparable rates to other races (including whites), and account for more than forty percent of those incarcerated for drug offenses.  As further evidence of how our national panic shapes policy and priorities, note the vast disparity in sentencing for powder cocaine (used primarily by upper- and middle-class whites) and crack cocaine (primarily an inner-city drug).  Possession of 28 grams of crack results in a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for a first offense; you’d need 500 grams of powder cocaine in order to receive the same sentence.  

So, to bring us back to the original purpose of this blog post, what conclusions can we draw from this about policing?  First of all, I would say that most cops aren’t participating in these racist policies because they themselves are bigots.  Indeed, very few people are actually saying that.  It’s because the institution they work for is engaged, actively and with our support, in policies that target poor, non-white minorities and recommend the strongest possible tactics in response to any aggression, non-compliance, or disrespect.  This is not to say that police aren’t well-intentioned, that their jobs aren’t dangerous and often thankless, or that they don’t put their lives and safety on the line for others.  They do.  And while they enforce these racist policies, they didn’t decide on them.

We did.

As an electorate, this is what we’ve said good policing looks like.  This is the evidence we need in order to believe the police are doing their job.  We prioritized the war on drugs, we directed our fear and frustration towards the inner-city, and we signed off on whatever means were necessary to end the threat.  We want arrest numbers.  We want raids and seizures.  We want dope on the table.  We want comforting, easily-digestible sound bytes that tell us that law and order has prevailed and the barbarians are no longer at the gates of our developments.  And we can get that, certainly.  Just not in conjunction with good police work.

Good police work takes time, patience, focus, and a ton of support.  Whenever you hear about a major drug dealer being arrested, or a repeat violent offender (as most violent offenders are, by the way – we can talk about that some other time) is finally brought in, it’s usually the product of months, sometimes years, of tireless effort on the part of law enforcement.  But we don’t have the attention span for that.  Most of us can’t even read an entire newspaper article from start to finish without skimming (guilty).

As far as recommendations go, I’d encourage you (if you agree with what I’ve written here) to advocate for reforms in drug policy.  Just trying to remove “racism” from policing is too nebulous, and doesn’t lend itself easily to sustainable solutions.  But reforming drug policy, and our approach to policing narcotics, will hopefully have positive effects in the neighborhoods where the drug war is so often fought.  Another way to help improve the situation overall is by supporting programs aimed at breaking the cycle of poverty – after-school programs, job training programs, prisoner reentry programs (Jersey City is doing some great work with this issue, I’m happy to say!), etc.  I especially want to throw out a plug for my favorite, Homeboy Industries, which does incredible work and LITERALLY ALWAYS NEEDS MONEY!!!!  

In short, give people hope and the opportunity to see those hopes realized, and you’ll be amazed by what they can achieve.

Also, educate yourself on police work.  Read up on history and policy.  Learn about the various commendable efforts police departments are doing to better work with their communities – from PAL Gyms to more on-the-ground methods of fostering positive relationships.  Cops aren’t ignorant of the drug war and its negative effects, and many of them are working hard to find another way to do things.  Also, you’ve probably heard so much rhetoric about how hard a cop’s job is that it’s easy to forget how true that really is.  Being cop is often thankless and miserable, but it is, in its best form, an act of selfless service.  That’s something worth appreciating, even if you don’t agree with everything they do or, like me, believe that they’re wrestling with deep institutional dysfunction.

All right, I’m done.  Hope that made some modicum of sense.  Feel free to reply with your thoughts, I’d just ask that you do so respectfully.  I hope I’ve worded this argument as civilly as possible, but I also know that I can get snarky when I’m passionate about something, so I apologize if my tone comes off as offensive.

*As a historical footnote, the 1964 Philadelphia race riot took place the summer before my dad’s freshman year at St. Joseph’s Prep.  At that time, the school shot off horizontally from the Church of the Gesu, running all the way down Stiles Street to 17th, and featured an immense, marble entryway.  It had been built back in the 1860’s, when the area around it was open land.  Eventually a neighborhood – largely white and working-class, I believe – sprung up around it.  By the mid-Sixties, however, North Philadelphia had become increasingly black.  In January 1966, most of the Prep burned down in an accidental fire (the quick work of a Jesuit preserving both the church and the adjoined Jesuit residence at 18th and Thompson).  Although there was some debate over moving the school, in the end they decided to rebuild at its current location.  The new school that was completed in 1968 – and which I attended – had none of the Roman grandeur of the old building.  It was blocky, brick, with high, narrow windows that I used to call “arrow slits,” because I’m clever like that.  It was, for all intents and purposes, a fortress; a barricade to keep students safe and the rapidly-darkening neighborhood out.  Recent renovations have made the building more inviting, but you can still see the arrow slits along Girard Avenue or 17th Street, a reminder of the fear that’s shaped our cities.

Lionhearts: The Lannister/Gryffindor Connection

This is a thought that occurred to me, like many great thoughts do, as I was getting ready for work one day.  According to Twitter (where, naturally, I immediately went to share this thought) it was actually the morning of my most recent birthday, which means I must have been granted access to some vein of cosmic truth as a gift from the universe.  Therefore, you can just assume that everything in this post is absolutely, one-hundred-percent correct and should be taken as canon for both series.  So, without further adieu, my theory:

Gerion Lannister is Godric Gryffindor.

Godric Gryffindor is, as I'm sure most of you know, one of the four legendary founders of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.  Gerion Lannister is more obscure: he's a minor character (mentioned only) in A Song of Ice and Fire, the fantasy series by Bayonne's finest, George R. R. Martin (which I'll refer to as ASoIaF from this point on).  It's currently five books long, and apparently spawned a TV adaptation.  Anybody watching that?  Is it still on?

Anyway, Gerion is one of Tywin Lannister's brothers, and uncle to Jaime, Cersei, and Tyrion Lannister.  The reason he never shows up in person is that by the time the story starts, he's been missing for several years, presumed dead.

Plausible, sure.  But not nearly as exciting as the possibility that he somehow slipped into another dimension, became a powerful wizard, and founded a magical boarding school in Scotland.

First, the evidence.  The thought actually occurred to me because I was thinking about the similarities between the sigils for Houses Lannister and Gryffindor.  Both are represented by a golden lion, rampant, on a crimson field.  This initially made me think, Hey, wouldn't it be funny if Godric were a Lannister?

And then I remembered the Sword of Gryffindor, and that's when the whole theory fell into place.

See, Gerion Lannister disappeared after he sailed east (more than a decade before the beginning of Game of Thrones) on a quest to the lost kingdom of Valyria, searching for old family treasures... including the legendary Lannister sword, Brightroar.  This sword was forged from Valyrian steel, a metal made with magic which makes it extremely strong and sharp.  The Sword of Gryffindor, Godric's legendary blade, was similarly spell-forged and known for its extraordinary qualities.  It also has rubies in its hilt, which is a decidedly Lannister flourish (as evidenced by the two Lannister swords fashioned from the late Ned Stark's Ice, Widow's Wail and Oathkeeper)

It occurred to me that Brightroar and the Sword of Gryffindor could very well be the same sword.  Which meant that Godric could be Gerion, or at least a descendant.  At the time of this revelation, I simply tweeted frantically about it and then went to work and pretended to be an adult.  But subsequent combing of the Harry Potter and ASoIaF wikis have revealed even more similarities.

Godric is described as having pale skin and green eyes, both Lannister traits.  Of course, Godric had red hair while Lannisters are pretty consistently blond, although that could be easily changed with a spell, Polyjuice potion, or, uh... dye.

Gerion is remembered for his humor and intelligence, and both Jaime and Tyrion considered him their favorite uncle.  He gave Tyrion books and encouraged his love of learning, so it's not a huge stretch to imagine him eventually being concerned with education on a larger scale.  While Godric is never described as being a barrel of laughs, he is brave (his most prominent trait, in fact) and Gerion was certainly that.  For those unfamiliar with the backstory of ASoIaF, Valyria was once a powerful empire that was destroyed thousands of years ago by an unpleasant-sounding event called the Doom.  The city of Valyria was abandoned and is avoided at all costs (sailor lore claims that even catching sight of the coastline will lead to an untimely death).  When Gerion announced his intention to sail into the ominously-named Smoking Sea (a hellish stretch of water around Valyria bristling with volcanoes and purportedly haunted by demons and krakens), half of his crew abandoned him.  But he went ahead with the journey anyway - you don't do that unless you're pretty brave, and at least a little reckless.

Finally, Godric settled in Godric's Hollow, a village in the West Country of England.  Gerion was from Casterly Rock, in the Westerlands of the Seven Kingdoms.  So, yeah.  Pretty much rock solid evidence.

Of course, the natural question that arises here is How would this even be possible?  These are characters from totally different series, totally different universes.  Gerion might have been searching for a magical sword, but he himself was a pretty ordinary dude.  Godric was a powerful wizard, renowned for his wisdom and skill as a wand duelist.  Where's the link?

Here's what I think: Gerion did sail into the Smoking Sea, and eventually arrived on the coasts of Old Valyria.  His crew slowly died, from a mix of supernatural horrors and (because this is GRRM) probably infections and other ignoble shit, but he eventually reaches the ruined city itself.  Gerion finds Brightroar (still clutched in the bony fist of the long-dead King Tommen II), but without any means of leaving Valyria, decides to stick around a little bit and explore.  Valyria was once a place of great magic, and Gerion begins to teach himself magic from the remaining lore he can find, probably in an attempt to find a way off and to survive on his surely-dwindling supplies.

But Valyria after the Doom is no ordinary place - it's a corner of the world where reality softens and fades.  There are suggestions of other such places existing in the world of ASoIaF, like the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai.  This is where the first dragons allegedly came from.  And in a GRRM-penned short story about Jaime and Tyrion trying to figure out how to defeat Cthulhu (which, yes, is a real thing), copies of books by Abdul Alhazared of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos are said to come from the Shadow Lands.  That's not the only reference to Lovecraft, by the way.  Maps of Essos include references to Ib, Sarnath, K'Dath (Kadath), and Carcosa, all otherworldly place names in Lovecraft's works.  And the ironborn's Drowned God bears more than a passing similarity to Great Cthulhu himself.

It might sound like I'm getting off topic, here, but not really: the Lovecraft references are the link that makes the Gerion/Godric theory possible.  Lovecraft's "weird horror" stories are all about different dimensions rubbing up against each other and bleeding together.  Usually the result of this interchange is that horrific immortal monster-gods breach the membrane of our reality and eat us.  Fun stuff.  Let's suppose for a moment that some of those monster-gods actually once existed in the dark, distant past of Westeros, and that the Carcosa, Sarnath, and Kadath on those maps are the same ones referenced in Lovecraft's canon.  That means that there's a history of dimensional crossover between the ASoIaF universe and Lovecraft's version of ours.  It's not too much of a stretch to imagine similar crossover happening with another universe, in this case the one that's home to the Harry Potter stories.[1]

Anyway, long story short: In Old Valyria, Gerion -- either intentionally or by accident -- slides through a crack in his reality and ends up in another.

He arrives in 10th Century England, a society in some ways similar to (and in other ways less advanced than) his own.  But one major difference (aside from the spelling of "sir," which must have been really tough for him to deal with for a while) was that magic was very prevalent in this world, with witches and wizards forming a vibrant shadow community alongside the non-magically-inclined Muggles.  With the magical knowledge he picked up in Valyria, Gerion naturally falls in with the wizarding community.

Wary about revealing the existence of his largely magic-less world to a bunch of powerful sorcerers, he decides to create a new identity to avoid any awkward questions.  Since a few people had met him when he first arrived, he decides to differentiate himself from that golden-haired stranger by dying his hair and growing a beard.  He claims to be from a village so small that, a few decades later, everybody's totally cool with renaming it.

He continues to study magic, and finds that he has a real aptitude for it.  A true Lannister, he particularly excels at fighting and becomes a famed duelist.  Unfortunately, he is unsuccessful in finding a way to return to Westeros, and eventually he resigns himself to the fact that he's stuck in the Harry Potter world for good.  Over time he sobers, going from the brash young man who sailed off in search of adventure to a wizard respected for his wisdom and courage.  And when someone asks if his magic sword is goblin-made, he says, "Uh... yeah, totally.  Goblins."  The goblins don't deny this rumor when they hear it, because it's good for business and (later on) it allows them to lay claim to it.

Gerion, now Godric, hooks up with three other famous wizards, and the four of them decide to establish a school to give magical instruction more structure (preceding the European university system by two centuries, by the way).  When they decide to break the school up into four Houses, he uses his old coat of arms as their symbol (though he has trouble getting "A Gryffindor always pays his debts" started.  Eventually the other founders get so sick of hearing him say it that they forbid him to use the phrase again.  It was basically his "fetch").  He gets especially close to Salazar Slytherin, whose cunning and ambition must have reminded him of his family.  Things go south, of course, when Slytherin tries to convince the other founders to stop accepting Muggle-born students into the school.  Gerion/Godric, who gained all of his magical ability from study rather than genetics, strongly opposes this plan, leading to a rift.

Eventually, Godric dies, far from home but having made a lasting impact on his adopted world.  It's also possible, based on a sarcastic comment by J.K. Rowling, that he's actually still alive and is the giant squid in the Hogwarts lake.  Which, based on what I've discussed previously, could be a jumping-off point for a further theory that Gerion Lannister is both Godric Gryffindor and a second cousin to Cthulhu.

But that would just be crazy.


[1] Also, both the Cthulhu mythos and the Harry Potter stories (albeit in a dramatically-reimagined form) exist in the sprawling universe of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series.  While it would be a much more direct connection to just say that Gerion goes there, the LoEG and Harry Potter universes should be seen as definitely separate.  Mostly because in LoEG, Harry Potter is a moonchild/anti-Christ who kills Allan Quartermain with penis lightening and then gets turned into sidewalk chalk by Mary Poppins.  This is a literal description of what happens in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009.  Alan Moore is a weird dude.  Spoiler alert, I guess.

Don't Bring a Dracon Beam to a Morphing Fight: The Inevitability of Yeerk Defeat

After looking over my old Animorphs books a bit (like I do), I came to a somewhat startling conclusion: The Yeerks were always going to lose the war.  In a meta sense, that’s obvious - they were the villains, and even if the series was going to end with deaths and depression and cliffhangers, it wasn’t going to end with the Animorphs losing.  But I mean that within the universe of the story, the Yeerks were well on their way to losing the larger conflict with the Andalites even before the Animorps blew up the ground-based pool and stole the Pool Ship.  This became most clear to me in the Hork-Bajir Chronicles and Visser.  

And now, because the Internet is lawless frontier land where anything can happen, I’ll present my argument to you.  It’ll be organized into three main points: 1) that the Yeerk military was relatively small, 2) that the Yeerks were critically short on hosts, and 3) that the Yeerks were hopelessly outgunned.  Once we’ve covered all of this, I’ll look at two additional points: 4) why we perceived the Yeerks as such a major threat in spite of their military inferiority, and 5) why this information doesn’t invalidate the Animorphs’ importance.  Let’s do it.

Part I: The Yeerks had a relatively small fighting force

Despite how ubiquitous and unstoppable the Yeerk threat seems in Animorphs, the actual Yeerk military is pretty small.  And, as the series reveals, they had been from the very beginning.

In the Hork Bajir Chronicles (HBC from here on), we see the initial uprising that allows the Yeerks to enter space and begin their path of conquest.  A small force of armed Gedd Controllers commandeer four Andalite fighters and two heavy transports.  Before leaving the planet, they touch down near several major Yeerk pools (I’m gonna go with Hett Simplat and Culat Hesh[1], since those are the only ones mentioned by Yeerks other than Sulp Niaar, which was right next to the Andalite base and, thus, not a place they were going to make a pit stop[2]).  They collect approximately a quarter million Yeerks (and, one would assume, a lot more Gedds/Gedd Controllers, since we run into so many of them later on - though I think we can also assume that they were breeding the Gedds) and then blast off, in search of more hosts.

The Andalites, pretty much immediately, blockade the Yeerk homeworld.  So it’s not like a lot more Yeerks were able to escape to join the imperial forces in space.  There were certainly some holes in the security cordon, of course.  Take the Council of Thirteen as an example.  In HBC, it’s implied pretty strongly that they’re still on the homeworld (Seerow’s sure that they must not have known about the insurgency, and he’s never contradicted by even so much as a <Uh, yeah, they were totally there too.>  Although if someone said it, it would have been Alloran, by the way.  He was famously sassy before that whole quantum virus thing).  #54 mentions the Yeerks on Earth receiving a transmission from the Yeerk homeworld to keep fighting, which further implies that the Yeerk leadership is still there.  

However, when we actually see the Council of Thirteen (in Visser), they’re all in hosts not indigenous to the Yeerk homeworld (Hork-Bajir, Taxxon, and some unidentifiable), and Visser Three notes that after hearing Visser One’s stories, they’ll probably want a shipment of human Controllers for their own use.  So either they got off-planet sometime after the HBC, or they’re able to receive care packages on the homeworld (hopefully with cute little hand-written notes on stationery from the various planets the Yeerks have conquered).  We know from an undeveloped story seed that the Yeerks had infiltrated the Andalite homeworld, as well, so they may have had some contacts who allowed them to slip back and forth between the blockade.[3]

Regardless, it still stands that as late in the story as Visser (which was released concurrently with #35), the Yeerk homeworld is still blockaded, and its liberation is a major goal of the Yeerks (which they really hope will be aided by the successful invasion of a Class Five species -- WHICH WE’LL GET TO IN A SECOND, DON’T RUSH ME).  So that initial escape in HBC was the largest number of Yeerks to leave the homeworld.  Granted, every time Yeerks reproduce they create hundreds of offspring, so their numbers would have grown pretty quickly, but that leads us to our second point…

Part II: The Yeerks were critically short on hosts

First, a word on the Yeerk classification system for hosts.  There are five distinct “classes” of hosts, which can be described as follows:

Class One: Physically unfit for infestation (i.e. Hawjabrans, Skrit Na)

Class Two: Capable of infestation, but suffer from severe drawbacks (i.e. Gedds, Taxxons)

Class Three: Physically fit for infestation, but are few in number and can’t be bred quickly (i.e. Hork-Bajir, Ongachics)

Class Four: Perfectly fit for infestation, but are too great a challenge to infest (i.e. Andalites)

Class Five: Physically fit, large numbers, breed quickly, and can’t put up much of a fight (i.e. humans)

Host shortages are a constant issue throughout HBC.  Initially, Yeerks are only allowed 15 minutes in a Gedd host for training, because of the overwhelming shortage of available hosts.  Their encounter with the Ongachics provides them with a small number of new hosts, and their encounter with the Hawjabrans with none.  So they’re understandably STOKED(!!!) when they get to the Hork-Bajir homeworld and find a bunch of big, strong, pretty dumb hosts, ready to be taken.  They do get a bunch of them, but of course get screwed by the release of the quantum virus, which wipes out a large percentage of the Hork-Bajir population (again, we can assume that the Yeerks subsequently bred them, despite the fact that they’re Class Three -- even if they can’t be bred quickly, their physical maturation is pretty quick once born, with Toby as a good example).  

Their next biggest host population are the Taxxons, who count as a Class Two species because of their insatiable hunger.  And then we hear about a number of other (never seen) races, including the Nahara, the Ssstram, and the Mak.  We have to assume that they are either Class Two  or Class Three, since neither of them seem to be swelling the Yeerk ranks all that much.  

That’s why so much hope was placed on Earth, the only Class Five species they’d located.[4]  Conquering the human race would have provided seven billion hosts who were versatile and somewhat user-friendly.  This certainly would have given the Yeerks an enormous numbers boost, which would be critical for mounting a land invasion of the Andalite homeworld.  BUT… they still would have lost.  Because…

Part III: The Yeerks were always outgunned

This comes up again and again in the series.  The Yeerks know they’ll never survive a head-to-head battle with the Andalites.  Any naval victory we see the Yeerks gain is usually from trickery (i.e. the ambush and destruction of the Dome Ships that came to Earth).  In HBC, and throughout, we see that Yeerk tech is largely just recycled or imitation Andalite technology, patched together with stuff they’ve taken from other species (i.e. the Dracon beam, an amalgam of Andalite and Ongachic technology).  It’s established that a couple of Dome Ships in orbit can turn a planet into a cinder in a matter of hours.  

Yeerk technology, on the other hand, isn't nearly as impressive. The Pool Ship can kinda look scary, I guess.  There’s also the Nova-class Empire Ship, which is presumably bigger than a Pool Ship.  However, we only ever see one and have no sense of its armament).  You’d think that if it could beat a contingent of Dome Ships, the Yeerks would have used it more.

Now, we know from HBC that the Yeerks do set up shipyards to expand their fleet on conquered worlds (at least they did on the Hork-Bajir world, which is where they created both the Blade Ship and the Bug Fighter). But then we come back around to the problem of manpower, and the fact that there simply aren't enough hosts to fly the ships even if they built enough to challenge the Andalites. We can also make an educated guess that the Yeerks use most of their fleet to hold onto conquered planets, which is why the Andalites don't bother trying to liberate them (although another reason for this will be discussed under Part IV).

A case study of the Yeerks' military inferiority relative to the Andalites can be found in the Anati gambit.  For those of you who didn’t spend a weekend crouched in your closets reading decade-old books, the Anati gambit was the Yeerks’ last-ditch effort to stay alive in the fight.  Visser One was sent to the Anati system to convince the Andalites that the inhabitable worlds there were their main priority, which would trick them into sending their fleet there instead of to Earth.  The Anati system was riddled with small moons, which the Yeerks planned to equip with Dracon cannons, intending to give the Andalites an unpleasant surprise when they emerged from Z-Space.  They know that if the Andalites go to Earth, the Yeerks are going to get their asses kicked, they’ll lose their Class Five species and, consequently, the war.

Unfortunately for them, that’s exactly what happens.  But even if the Anati gambit had worked, and the Yeerks had somehow infested the entire human population in a matter of months (the logistics of which are mind boggling), they’d still be hopelessly outgunned.  Not in a land battle, maybe.  But Earth wasn’t going to provide them with more ships, and even with their shipyards working on overtime we’ve established that the Yeerk navy couldn’t stand against the Andalites.  Unless those Dracon cannons in the Anati system somehow wiped out over half of the entire Andalite navy, the Yeerk fleet would most likely be defeated before they could ever make landfall on the Andalite world.

So, if the Yeerks were pretty much guaranteed to lose the war, why did they appear to be such a threat?  Let’s move on to...

Part IV: Rashomon

It’s really a matter of perspective.  Imagine the war as existing on various tiers.  The Animorphs are on the ground tier, in the trenches, alone and surrounded by the enemy.  To them, the Yeerks seem pretty much invincible.  From a higher tier, however -- say, from the perspective of the Council of Thirteen or the Andalite High Command -- things could look pretty different.

I won’t disagree that the Yeerks ran circles around Andalites for a while.  But this was, I believe, an issue of unfamiliarity rather than the Yeerks having an advantage.  For one thing, the Andalites had never fought a war on this scale before (or so we can assume, since it never comes up -- before this, in the modern age anyway, it seems they were mostly just involved in police actions).  They have a standing navy, but even that is relatively small (albeit bigger than the Yeerks’).  Elfangor mentions in The Andalite Chronicles that typically the state limits Andalite families to two children, but that there’s been discussion of expanding the limit in order to fill the ranks.  And as I discussed before, the Yeerks never engaged the Andalites in head-to-head conflict, preferring guerrilla tactics instead.  The Andalites had to learn how to counteract these tactics, and it forced them to fight the war on multiple stages, spread out across the galaxy.  Adding to the sense of always being a step behind is that the Andalites seem to focus on preventing further Yeerk advancement. They commit their fleet to preventing new conquests (i.e. Leera, the Anati system) instead of liberating conquered worlds/low priority targets. Hence why they couldn't just send the majority of their forces straight to Earth on Ax’s word (and when they do decide to intervene, their original plan was basically a controlled burn).

The Andalites aren't used to being challenged.  Their fear of the Yeerks probably has more to do with that (<If they've kept fighting us, the mighty and powerful Andalites, for this long, who KNOWS what else they’re capable of?!>) than anything else.  But even if they legitimately think that the Yeerks could win the war through anything other than trickery (which they don’t), the Yeerks know that they can’t.  Visser, which lets us peek into the upper echelons of the Yeerk military, shows us how desperate the situation really is from their perspective.

There’s another reason why the Andalites might be interested in presenting the Yeerks as an unstoppable contagion to their own soldiers and the rest of the galaxy, by the way: propaganda.  We know it exists -- Aftran mentions how the Andalites paint Yeerks as a monolithic evil in #19. And it makes sense: the Andalites are, naturally, a pretty peaceful people, so the High Command would need to really up the stakes to get massive buy-in for this war.  A nigh-unstoppable evil spreading through the galaxy like a plague would fit that bill perfectly. They’d also want to discourage other species from collaborating with the Yeerks (and counteract some anti-Andalite sentiment that may have existed before the war -- more on that below).  

Of course, most of what we hear of Andalite propaganda isn't too far off the mark, even if it does lack the nuance of reality. The Yeerks are on a galaxy-wide mission of conquest (even if dedication to this cause varies among your average Yeerk-on-the-street). However, we also hear some horror stories about the Yeerks that are countered by evidence. In The Andalite Chronicles, Elfangor claims that there are only three sentient species in the galaxy who haven't been conquered by the Yeerks [5], and that of those three only the Andalites have the power to oppose them. Over the course of the series, however, we learn about at least five species (the Skrit Na, Leerans, Helmacrons, Hawjabrans, and the Kelbrid) that the Andalites are aware of who are never conquered by the Yeerks. Granted, only the Leerans are possible targets (I'm assuming the Kelbrid are a Class Four species), but still, the numbers don't work. Also, there's the claim that Yeerks terra-form conquered worlds (in #7, I believe) to make them more similar to their homeworld. This claim is contradicted by post-conquest visits to the Hork-Bajir and Taxxon worlds.

But the veracity of Andalite propaganda is less important than the primary reason behind it. And this is where this post gets even crazier by slipping into conspiracy territory: The Andalites wanted to paint the Yeerks as an unstoppable force that only they could stop because it would basically validate everything they were doing already.

I used the phrase “police action” above, and that was intentional.  The series presents the Andalites as a sort of galactic police force, not only fighting the Yeerks but detaining and arresting Skrit-Na raiders[6] and Norshk pirates.  As far as we can tell, however, the Andalites don’t answer to any authority other than themselves.  So they’ve basically elected themselves the peacekeepers of the galaxy, which is usually something people only do when they want to maintain control.  It bears mentioning that first contact between the Andalites and Yeerks happened because the Andalites came to their planet and immediately established a military garrison (also that the Andalites were pretty racist towards the Yeerks even before they became enemies).

You could imagine that maybe most sentient races in the galaxy aren’t always enormous fans of the Andalites.  But when they’re the only thing standing between you the invasion, infestation, and brutal terra-forming of your homeworld, then you might start looking at them differently.

If this was intentional on the Andalites’ part, it works.  By the end of the Yeerk War, they’re in a better position than ever to police the galaxy.[7]

Part V: The Yeerks still could have conquered Earth

The Yeerks weren't going to win the war… but they totally could have won the battle.  While we humans have some real moxy (which is an actual point made in our favor by humans, Andalites, and Yeerks alike throughout the series… not with the actual word moxy, but you know…), the Yeerks had us beat technologically.

All of this to say that, regardless of anything I've written here, the Animorphs' fight did make a difference.  The Yeerks could have conquered Earth, and if they had, it’s more likely than not that the Andalites would have incinerated the planet from orbit.  Instead, the Yeerks lost their final conflict with the Animorphs, their chance at conquering a Class Five species and, consequently, the war.

Of course, if the book Yeerks had developed those Kandrona-free Super Yeerks from the TV show, this might have been a different story.

Notes:

[1] To be fair, however, Hett Simplat or Culat Hesh could have been pools established on conquered worlds, which I’m assuming they would have named (despite the fact that the pool on Earth is only ever called “The Yeerk Pool”).

[2] This would imply that only Yeerks from the original uprising are from the Sulp Niaar pool.  That being said, it’s also possible that Yeerks claiming that designation (like Temrash 114, who doesn’t seem like a veteran) are just descended from tripartite Sulp Niaar parents and carry on the pool designation as a matter of tradition/pride.

[3] Relatively undeveloped, anyway.  Hints are dropped in #4 (when Visser Three morphs a creature from one of the Andalite world’s moons) and #18 (Visser Three morphs a kafit bird, and we learn that Samilin-Corrath-Gahar is collaborating with the Yeerks).  This was apparently a story seed that was supposed to grow further, but it was eventually lost in the shuffle (K.A. Applegate said this in a Q&A event a few years back, but I can’t find the link).  As a side note, the fact that Visser Three’s kafit bird morph is taken by Ax as evidence that the Yeerks may have infiltrated the Andalite homeworld is considered a KASU (K.A. Screws Up) because all arisths acquire a kafit bird morph for training purposes.  However, since Alloran was already a full-fledged war prince by the time the morphing technology became widely used, it’s possible that his training process was different from the standardized one that Elfangor, Ax, etc. went through.

[4] A related point: in Visser, Visser Three implies that the human population is greater than the entire Yeerk military.  He says this during an attempt to trick Visser One into committing treason, telling her that if they controlled Earth they could easily wipe out the rest of the Empire and start their own regime.  Granted, he’s lying, but it’s a lie that Visser One was supposed to believe, so there was some kernel of truth.  When she calls him out on it, by the way, the only thing about his story she takes issue with is the idea that he would ever suggest they work together.  This suggests that, even three decades after the initial Yeerk uprising, they still have a critical host shortage.

[5] I think it's three, anyway.  I don't have the books on me at the moment, so if anyone wants to fact check this, feel free.

[6] For all of their negative qualities, by the way, the Skrit Na were engaging in interstellar travel while the Andalites were still talking with sign language because they hadn’t figured out how to use their own natural ability of thought speak.  THEIR OWN NATURAL ABILITY, GUYS.

[7] To be fair, there is one major point that refutes this argument: the fact that the Andalites didn’t immediately use evidence that the Blade Ship had entered Kelbrid space (and Ax’s subsequent capture) as cause to begin making incursions into Kelbrid space.  However, this could also be because the Andalite’s didn’t like their chances of open war with the Kelbrid when they’re still recovering from the last war (we also know that the Kelbrid have an enormous amount of territory, and presumably have some serious military might in order to have gotten the Andalites to agree to a we-leave-each-other-alone treaty in the first place).