There was something I left out of my last two columns about the orphaned elephants at South Africa’s Pilanesberg Park where I compared what happened there to the fatherless “orphans” in troubled black neighborhoods.
Fixing the elephant youth gang problem had a two-pronged solution: policing the elephants with father figures and policing them with humans outside the herd. I wrote mostly about the first, where father figures – adult males – were relocated to Pilanesberg who “kicked butt” to keep the delinquents in line. They took on the role of policeman inside the herd when youthful exuberance threatened to spill over into troublemaking.
A case in point was Amarula, the largest of the adult bulls. He encountered an aggressive youngster who had the gumption to walk up and provoke him. Amarula hit the young elephant so hard in the stomach that it lifted him several feet into the air. Others took note. Problem solved.
The lesson? Amarula didn’t obsess over the troublemaker’s emotions. He wasn’t twisted into knots about the troubled background that created his aggression. He just knew this snot-nosed juvenile was out of line. So he and other adult males – majestic and gentle by nature – morphed into “agents of wrath” when circumstances left them no choice. They nipped the violent streak in the bud because, in the herd, chaos is not an option. When the adult males policed the young ones inside the herd, it stopped the violence and killing outside the herd.
Policing outside the herd was that second prong. It was brutal. It only came into play when there were no adult male role models around to “kick butt.” With rhino violence and killings gone wild, park staff had no choice but to intervene. Doing nothing was not an option.
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That’s when things got ugly. Elephants that refused to stop the violence were shot. Five at Pilanesberg. It wasn’t ideal, but drastic measures protected rhinos from death and eliminated the negative influences that pushed gangs of orphans to crime. This is the brutal side of civility and compassion.
Jock McMillan, park ecologist at a private reserve next to Pilanesberg, was in anguish when one juvenile elephant, Mafuta, had to be shot. McMillan took pains to reform Mafuta, at times with great risk to his own life. But Mafuta refused to comply with human authority, continued his violence, and employed himself as a gang leader.
“I wasn’t happy,” said McMillan. “I realize it had to be done, but because you’ve been working rather closely with these animals, you form emotional attachments.”
“… it had to be done.” That’s the attitude we need when we ask police to deal with rampant violence and killings in the streets of urban black neighborhoods. Not that human beings – even thugs – should be shot down willy-nilly like animals. That’s not the answer. But the problem of black crime must be dealt with head-on.
I think of the horrific video of Brittany Hill, 24, who was shot and killed in Chicago a few weeks ago while carrying her 1-year-old daughter. Or Chantis Greene, 39, whose boyfriend bludgeoned her to death with an ax in South Carolina. And I think of the 24 people who were shot last weekend in Chicago – three fatal – including Jaslyn Adams, a 7-year-old who was with her dad at a McDonald’s.
The lack of policing inside homes has forced troubled neighborhoods to rely too heavily on police outside the home. Outside is where things have turned ugly.
When a boy like Adam “Lil Homicide” Toledo pals around past midnight with a gang member and a gun, then runs from police responding to a “shots fired” call, there’s a chance he won’t make it home.
When a big man like George Floyd gets high on fentanyl, uses counterfeit money, and resists arrest, he opens the door to things turning ugly.
When Daunte Wright runs from police while being handcuffed, he triggers the event that leads to police accidentally pulling the trigger that ended his life.
When Jacob Blake defies a restraining order to trespass on the property of the girlfriend that he digitally raped, then fights off police after he’s tasered, we shouldn’t be surprised that police shoot him as he goes for a knife in his car.
When Rayshard Brooks manhandles police officers trying to arrest him, grabs their taser, then aims it at them while running into the dark, it’s not shocking that things turned ugly.
Police are not surrogate fathers – they are law enforcers. We expect them to strike terror in the hearts of aggressive young adolescents turned hard-nosed criminals and killers who put innocent people in danger. This is the brutal stuff of civility that must be done. Chaos should never be an option.
But tragically, chaos is optional when it reinforces a narrative.
Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict has not solved the black crime problem. It has only reinforced the false narrative that police are the biggest problem in troubled neighborhoods. That’s a lie.
According to Jim Quinn, a New York prosecutor for 42 years, police shootings of black men are “rare in Gotham, rare nationwide.”
“When they do happen, there is always a back story,” Quinn wrote in a New York Post column. “… the victim resisting arrest, attempting to grab the officer’s pistol or Taser. Watching the heartbreaking footage, I keep thinking, ‘Stop fighting the cops!’”
But there’s a real threat to New Yorkers of color, Quinn wrote. Crime. The political response? Relaxing bail laws, releasing dangerous criminals from jails, and defunding the police.
“And now murder is up 30 percent, shooting victims are up 89 percent, burglary up 43 percent, car theft up 59 percent over the last year,” he wrote.
The elephants at Pilanesberg Park had a happy ending because park staff, who genuinely loved them, were dead serious about solving the crime problem.
We’re not.
Black crime is a bottomless pit because lawless gangs of media pundits, activists, and Democrat politicians herd through black neighborhoods to feed on the blood and death of broken black families created by their failed policies.
Having orphaned themselves from the rule-of-law principles of the Founding Fathers, institutionally, they’ve become Fatherless – political delinquents who perpetuate crime in urban black communities to get and keep political power.
Humans are not elephants, but nature is nature. Fatherhood is primal. If troubled black neighborhoods are infused with fathers or father figures to “curb youthful exuberance” of young males in the home, we wouldn’t need police to do it in the streets.
Until then, policing is the brutal and necessary side of civility. It has to be done.
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