Town of Middleborough, Legislators and MassDOT Collaborate to Address Safety Concerns at Route 28 and Merchant’s Plaza Intersection

Short-, Medium- and Long-Term Solutions Identified

MIDDLEBOROUGH – Town Manager James McGrail and Select Board Chair Mark Germain are pleased to announce that the Town of Middleborough, legislators, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) and the Southeastern Regional Planning and Economic Development District (SRPEDD) are working together to address safety concerns at the Route 28 and Merchant’s Plaza intersection.

On Tuesday, May 23, the Town of Middleborough met with State Representatives Norman Orrall and Susan Williams Gifford, representatives from Senator Marc Pacheco’s office, SRPEDD, Highway District 5 Director Mary-Joe Perry and MassDOT representatives to discuss ways in which the town and state can address safety concerns at the Route 28 and Merchant’s Plaza intersection.

Prior to this meeting, Sen. Pacheco met with MassDOT Secretary Gina Fiandaca last week to discuss the intersection and facilitate solutions.

There have been safety concerns at the Route 28 and Merchant’s Plaza intersection, which is also closely located near the Goode Elementary and Burkland Elementary Schools, since 1988. In 1989, the then-police chief identified the need for a traffic signal at this location stating that there would be a serious public safety problem without one.

The discussion was once again raised following the tragic death of a 15-year-old Middleborough resident Dylan Levesque as a result of an accident that occurred on May 14.

“I would like to thank Middleborough’s town officials, the legislators, SRPEDD and MassDOT for moving so quickly to make a change! The intersection has been so unsafe for our children and members of our community for such a long time,” Dylan Levesque’s mother, Chelsea Levesque, said. “It’s time something was done about it! When my son Dylan passed away, my family and I made it our personal mission to ensure no other family would ever have to go through such a tragedy. And now, because change is being made, I hope that no one ever will.”

During the meeting with town officials and legislators on Tuesday, the Town, MassDOT and SRPEDD committed to collaborate and investigate several solutions to address these concerns. Solutions and action steps include the following:

Short-term solutions:

• Within the next two weeks, dense vegetation located in this area will be cut down to improve visibility
• Pavement markings will be drawn to redo the crosswalk at the Route 28 and Merchant’s Plaza intersection and Wood Street intersection to improve visibility
• Crosswalk signage will also be posted at the Route 28 and Merchant’s Plaza intersection
• Lighting upgrades will be made to improve road visibility at night
• SRPEDD will begin to conduct their Traffic Counting Program the week of June 5 to collect data and research putting a light signal at this location

Medium-term solutions:

• Investigate the installation of rapid flashing light signals at the crosswalk to alert drivers of those who are trying to cross the street at the intersection of Route 28 at Merchant’s Way Plaza
• By mid-summer, the town will also apply for the area near the Route 28 and Merchant’s Plaza intersection to be designated as a school zone
• The town will also apply to the Massachusetts Safe Routes to School (SRTS) Program which will allow for a safety study to be conducted of the Route 28 corridor between the Route28/105 intersection and Wood Street

Long-term solutions:

• Investigate the complete redesign and construction of a new and improved intersection that includes a traffic light

“We are extremely pleased to share these action items with our community members as we hope that with each solution we will be able to improve the intersection little by little until we can work toward redesigning and constructing a newer and safer intersection with lights,” Town Manager McGrail said. “I would like to thank all town departments, local and state legislators and MassDOT for their work and collaboration in addressing this area of concern quickly and effectively. I, along with everyone else in the town, look forward to having a safer intersection for all in this busy area of our town.”

Added Select Board Chair Germain, “The Town of Middleborough is committed to addressing this problem intersection, and we are pleased to be working alongside our state partners to facilitate this work. We hope that in the weeks to come we will have significant improvement completed in this area.”

During the week of May 15, MassDOT representatives also visited the Town of Middleborough to conduct an evaluation of the Route 28 and Merchant’s Plaza intersection.

“On behalf of the town, I would like to thank MassDOT for its commitment to several significant changes to this intersection and the Route 28 corridor between the Route 28/105 intersection and Wood Street,” Town Planner Leeann Bradley said. “My office has already contacted the owner of Merchant’s Plaza and we will be visiting the site to view sight distance issues caused by dense vegetation. Any vegetation that impedes sight distance will be removed as soon as possible.”

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RSN: FOCUS: Uvalde Police Didn't Move to Save Lives Because That's Not What Police Do

 

 

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FOCUS: Uvalde Police Didn't Move to Save Lives Because That's Not What Police Do
Natasha Lennard, The Intercept
Lennard writes: "It should not take an event so devastating to break the spell of policing mythology about what cops do - and what they don't."

It should not take an event so devastating to break the spell of policing mythology about what cops do — and what they don’t.

The more details that emerge about how police responded to the massacre in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, the clearer it is that the already well-funded, heavily armed and amply trained law enforcement officers on the scene failed to save the lives of 19 children and two of their teachers.

Here’s what we know so far, based on haunting videos from the scene outside Robb Elementary School and statements from police officials themselves. Salvador Ramos murdered 21 people. Despite earlier, misleading claims from law enforcement officials, it appears that no police officers engaged with the shooter before he entered the school. Instead of rushing in to protect the children and staff when reports of a gunman approaching the school were made at 11:30 a.m., police instead waited outside and aggressively confronted parents who were begging them to enter. The parents were threatened with arrest — one cop brandished a Taser — as they attempted to access the school to save their kids themselves.

One mother who was urging the police to enter the building, Angeli Rose Gomez, was handcuffed. When she was released, she managed to run into the school, grab her kids, and bring them out to safety, which is the alleged job of the police. According to one Texas Department of Public Safety lieutenant interviewed by local news, some officers did run into the school — but only to grab their own children.

The Border Patrol SWAT team that eventually engaged with and killed the shooter — 40 minutes to an hour after first shots were reported — was not able to break down the door to the classroom where the killer was holed up with more children. A staff member had to unlock it with a key. According to the chilling firsthand account of a fourth grader in the room, cops told children to yell “if you need help”; when one little girl did, the gunman immediately shot her.

The police failed at protecting the schoolchildren, yes, but we should not be under the illusion that this is an example of the cops failing at their jobs. As far we can tell from reports, police at the scene acted as they usually do, in accordance with standard policing practice: Rather than risk a hail of gunfire to stop the killer, they kept themselves safe.

As Akela Lacy noted on Wednesday in The Intercept, the approach is not an outlier: “As the number of school resource officers has ballooned over the last two decades, so has the number of school shootings. There is no evidence that police have the ability to stop these shootings from happening.”

The behavior of the police at Robb Elementary is only shocking if you are committed to a mythic notion of what policing entails. The “thin blue line” does not, as reactionary narratives would have it, separate society from violent chaos. This has never been what police do, since the birth of municipal policing in slave patrols and colonial counterinsurgencies. The “thin blue line” instead separates those empowered by the state to uphold racial capitalism with violence, and to do so with impunity.

It is disgusting, not shocking, that police officers would sooner harass and handcuff parents — parents begging them to save their children from a massacre — than they would run in and put themselves in the line of fire. What is striking, though, is how inconceivable it is to so many people that policing is not, in fact, what they’ve been told it is by the police themselves, by those in power, and by the mainstream culture built around those mutually reinforcing myths.

Since police propaganda relies on the repetition of lies, certain corrective truths bear repeating too.

Being a police officer is not even among the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the U.S. Roofers, loggers, and delivery drivers all face greater risks to their lives at work. For the last two years in a row, the leading cause of death among cops, purportedly in the line of duty, is the coronavirus pandemic.

And cops don’t solve most crimes. Only around 2 percent of major crimes are solved by police. Police also don’t prevent crime, they criminalize: Ninety percent of the almost all Black people stopped under the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy were not committing any crime at all. There’s scant evidence that police surveillance reduces or prevents crime. What policing does do, however, is criminalize poverty and the communities of color forced to live in it.

In just the last month, the vast and wealthy army that is the NYPD failed to apprehend two shooters on the subway system — a system that crawls with cops and surveillance. When the first of these shooters was eventually taken into custody, thanks to the intervention of a civilian who spotted him, he was just blocks away from the site of a homeless encampment, which the police were busy destroying.

So what are cops up to? Katie May, writing on the All Cops Are Posters Substack, gathered the social media posts of the Uvalde Police Department to show that, rather than saving lives and risking their own, the Texas cops spend a considerable amount of their time arresting and caging desperate men, women, and children attempting to enter the U.S. through the southern border.

Even the Supreme Court affirmed in 2005 that police departments are not in fact obligated to provide protection to the public. Our safety is quite simply not what our tax dollars, endlessly funneled into glutted police departments, pay for. Meanwhile, it was two teachers who put their bodies in the line of fire and died trying to protect children during Tuesday’s massacre.

As Patrick Blanchfield, author of the forthcoming “Gunpower: The Structure of American Violence,” noted on Twitter, “U.S. police are trained to maximize control over situations while minimizing their personal risk. That translates into beating parents while a rampage shooter executes their children just as easily as it does their rolling up on a kid with a toy guy and executing him seconds later.”

To be clear, this was not a question of funding or training: Police in the Uvalde school district had both.

Those of us who have been calling for the defunding of police departments — indeed for police abolition in favor of real, collective public safety practices — have been treated by Democratic and Republican leaders and commentators alike as fanatical. In the face of decades, if not centuries of evidence exposing what the work of policing actually entails — and does not entail — the true ideologues are those committed to policing as a social solution.

It would be too generous to those in power to grant that they have simply been misled by copaganda. By insisting that we double down on policing, they make clear that they too uphold what the institution of policing defends: property, power, and racial hierarchy.

The police response to just this latest massacre of children is drawing rightful ire. Yet that alone is unlikely to turn the tides of political will when it comes to shattering the myth of policing. The lionization of the police is as deep seated as any American ideology — resistant to buckling under its own contradictions and obvious falsities. This is a country, after all, founded on genocide, slave labor, and universalist claims to equality for all. Violent contradictions should come as no surprise.

Those who have dismissed calls to defund the police as too radical ought to question their own convictions about policing. It should not take an event so devastating — with police behavior so counter to the task of saving lives — to break the spell of policing mythology.

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