ISIS Comes To Warwick (UPDATED)

Today the quiet neighborhood of Governor Francis Farms became the center of a federal-level investigation as state and local police, as well as members of the FBI, investigated a house on Aspinet Drive linked to Usaama Rahim, a African American Muslim killed yesterday in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston by police.  Rahim, whose older brother Ibrahim is an imam at the Oakland, California Lighthouse Mosque and earlier Masjid Al-Quran in Dorcester, was said by police to be carrying a "military-style" knife.  However, the brother of the deceased claims that his brother was on the telephone with his father at the time he was confronted at a bus stop beside a CVS Pharmacy, hoping to create a record.  The authorities claim that the deceased had recently become radicalized by ISIS via the internet and had been under surveillance for some time.
Police Commissioner William Evans later convened a meeting with local civic religious leaders, including Boston Imam Abdullah Farooq, and screened a copy of the security camera video.  Farooq said that he felt the video was inconclusive and described it as vague while also saying that the deceased was not at a bus stop, was not shot in the back, and he appeared to be approaching the police officers.
This is not the first brush with violence linked to Islam for Rhode Island.  It is known now that a man from West Warwick was perhaps involved in radicalizing Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother of convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was killed in the manhunt for the two assailants after the 2013 attacks.  The elder Tsarnaev also was married to a woman originally from North Kingston.  However, the wind blows both ways on this account.  On September 12, 2001, Providence Police responded to a tip and arrested Milford, Massachusetts resident Sher J.B. Singh at the Amtrak station over alleged connections to terrorism, even though Mr. Singh was in fact a Sikh, not a Muslim.
UPDATE, JUNE 3, 10:16 PM: Information has yet to be forthcoming about the exact nature of the investigation.  However, Glenn Greenwald over at The Intercept has posted this great commentary piece about the situation:

Even the police’s version of events, if believed, raises all sorts of questions. They say Rahim was under “24-hour surveillance” by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, and were monitoring him for at least two years. When they approached him, they had no arrest or search warrant, but instead simply wanted to question him. When they did so, he pulled out his knife, and when he refused to put it away and walked toward them, they shot and killed him…  What was their intention in approaching him this way? Were they wearing uniforms, and — supposedly believing he was an ISIS operative eager to kill police — did they do anything to make him feel threatened?

ACLU Police Filming App Hits The Streets, Needed in Rhode Island

The American Civil Liberties Union, in collaboration with Quadrant 2, Incorporated, has recently released an app called Mobile Justice.  Originally released for use in California, it now has variants available in North Carolina, Missouri, Mississippi, and Nebraska.  Along with the ability to film a video that automatically uploads the the ACLU servers, it also includes a tab that summarizes your rights when encountering a law enforcement official, the capability to file a digital incident report with the Union, and notifications of upcoming events.  The only question remaining is when this program will be available in the Ocean State.

Opinion: Notes From An Overdose Epidemic, In Memoriam of Danny L. and Elijah F.

As noted by Dan McGowan of WPRI 12 News Providence and other reporters, death due to opiate overdose is becoming a tragic problem in the Ocean State.  According to this collection of data from the Department of Health, 2014 saw 239 total deaths from such overdoses.

However, pure numbers fail to do justice to what has been defined as an epidemic by the DOH.  Already we have seen 91 deaths in 2015, according to this piece by the Boston Globe.  Behind each of these digits stands a family destroyed, a friend loss, a parent made absent.  The addition of a synthetic opiate called fentanyl has increased the potency and fatality of heroin here in Southern New England.
Today I went to the second memorial for someone I knew due to opiate overdose.  Last August, someone I knew at Rhode Island College was also made a statistic in this disaster.  Two memorials in less than one year is far too uncomfortable for any person, but especially when the two individuals were under the age of thirty.  To quote HAMLET:

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Rhode Island's substance abuse problems are not new fare, having previously been ranked for one of the highest concentrations for marijuana, cocaine, and binge drinking per capita population.  The state does not have a substance abuse problem as much as a recovery problem.  Detoxification centers are one of the major businesses in the state.  What is truly wrong is the dynamic and method we as a society not just encourage but sanctify as praxis.
Journalist Johann Hari has written in this story on Huffington Post and in his new book CHASING THE SCREAM: THE FIRST AND LAST DAYS OF THE WAR ON DRUGS that addiction has almost nothing to do with chemical hooks and everything to do with social standing.  He writes:

Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else…  [T]he opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection…  When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along.

Here is Hari this past February on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman:

When I talked with people who were also familiar with these two drug deaths I knew of, what struck me was that both ended their short lives in extreme loneliness.  That is a painful life.  The need for an outlet, be it drugs, drink, or other vices, is powerful and obviously deadly.

So what do we need to do as a state?  There are some obvious steps to take:

• Encourage the abolition of our social stigma about addiction and replace it with a dynamic of empathy.
• Re-design our drug abuse prevention curriculums to create a better understanding of the user as an individual.
• End the Drug War and our Prohibition culture while re-directing the funds spent putting people in jail for being lonely towards programs based around this new socialization dynamic about addiction.

In the meantime, we must mourn those we lost and pray we might not loose others.  This is a long-winded, tedious, seemingly endless process.  But until we implement the aforementioned steps at the minimum, we will continue to loose people we love.