In Shooting an Elephant, what crisis was George Orwell called to solve?

George Orwell's essay about his experiences as a colonial police officer in British-occupied Burma, Shooting an Elephant, is the author's bitter indictment of the dehumanizing effects on occupied and occupier alike of European imperialism. The answer to the question -- what crisis was Orwell called to solve -- is implied in the story's title. In his capacity as a sub-divisional police officer in the southern Burmese town of Moulmein, Orwell is called upon to deal with an unusual problem, described by the author early in his essay:

"Early one morning the subinspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it?"

Orwell, then, is compelled to deal with a rampaging elephant that has destroyed property and, as the investigating officer discovers, killed a villager, a scene described in excruciating detail:

"He [the villager] was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit."

While the elephant was largely domesticated, it had gone rogue and, in the eyes of the indigenous population, had to be put down -- an expectation that ran counter to Orwell's instincts and that presented him with a moral quandary that came to symbolize the futility and barbarity inherent in colonialism. By the time Orwell, now armed with a powerful rifle, encounters the elephant, its anger or fear had dissipated and it no longer presented a threat to the town. The villagers, however, are anxious to see how Orwell, the representative of the occupying power, deals with the situation, and this hapless police officer feels compelled to shoot the now-harmless animal rather than appear weak in the eyes of those he is supposed to rule in the name of the British Empire he serves.