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As the Boynton Beach Police Department is about to face a lawsuit for wrongful death in the case of a 13-year old boy who crashed his dirt bike while running from an officer, we reached out to Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw to find out how his agency handles pursuits.
"When we make a traffic stop and the person that we stop takes off, we're going to go after them for a short period of time to see if they'll stop again. If they don't, then we'll terminate the pursuit because a traffic violation doesn't rise to the level of what we're going to do to get involved in a full blown pursuit."
He says the deputies will have taken note of the license plate number and can find the offender another time.
Not wanting to speak specifically to the Boynton Beach case, Bradshaw did say that people recklessly driving dirt bikes is not something that is isolated to this one situation.
"This is an organized group of people out of Miami and they encourage people in (Miami)Dade, Broward and Palm Beach County to come to a meeting place and then get on the road with everything...whether it's bicycles, golf carts, ATV's, regular motorcycles, motorbikes or whatever and they do wheelies and they get up on the sidewalks."
Just as we heard from the Broward County Sheriff this week, law enforcement is aware of the Wheels Up, Guns Down demonstrators that typically attempt to take over South Florida's roadways on Martin Luther King Day, this Monday.
The Florida Highway Patrol says they will also be out in force, handing out tickets and making arrests. They'll have officers on the roads and in the sky.