Drive Safely

Superman always makes catching the bad guys look so effortless. He glides through the sky seeking out crime scenes and saving the innocent. If only it were that easy in real life.

It was only earlier today that police received a call reporting the burglary of a home in Boynton Beach. The call was taken at 8:30 a.m. and officers immediately arrived at the scene. Upon arriving, they happened to witness a fleeing blue Ford truck with suspicions that the burglars were in that very getaway car. As the first officers to arrive called for assistance, three more officers answered the call. The three officers jumped in a police car together and set off on their way to help.  What could have potentially been an easy case suddenly took a change of course and went terribly awry. As the officers hurried to assist in catching the culprits, the police officer driving the car lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a concrete pole.

The police car now wrapped around a concrete pole held the unidentified officers trapped inside. Within minutes rescue teams and police officers arrived at the site of the crash. It was not a speedy procedure as rescue crews attempted to safely extract the constrained police officers from what now appeared to be a very intricate mess of metal. Once rescued all three police officers were sent directly to Delray Medical Center.

As chaos rapidly struck before even ten in the morning,  John Schulze witnessed the immediate aftermath as he wondered what a police car was possibly doing in his next door neighbor’s front yard.  He then noticed the cement pole laying on the ground and the shattered glass which littered his neighbor’s driveway.

All the while simultaneously the suspected criminals too were reported to have experienced a collision of their own approximately a mile away from the police car crash. The burglars were forced to abandon their blue Ford truck. They had driven straight into the side of a house, but appear to be relatively fine as all three suspects managed to escape on foot.  Two of the three suspects have been detained and are now in custody of the police while officers remain on the lookout for the third culprit. The last suspect is said to still be in the area and is described as armed and dangerous. Nervously, near by schools Poinciana Elementary and Lake Worth Christian excercised temporary lockdowns until given reason by local authorities to allow students to go outside.

It is a shame that we cannot fly like Superman or effortlessly catch the bad guys without breaking a sweat. The moral of this story is that regardless of being the good guy or the bad guy, or just a random guy driving to work, one should always be careful and mindful of their surroundings when driving. Oddly there are only a limited number of laws which attempt to monitor police pursuits, a/k/a car chases. Police officers maintain the right to pursue which allows them to initiate car chases as they deem necessary.

A separate issue in itself, little stands in the way of determining what is allowed in car chases in reference to disregarding traffic laws such as running red lights or speeding to dangerous extremes. As reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data, hundreds of deaths occur each year as a result of police chases. Of these deaths, many of those killed are innocent bystanders who are just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Since there are no guildlines constituting what circumstances are necessary in pursuing car chases, TV channel ABC is advocating for national police guidelines prohibiting officers from pursuing car chases unless a life is at stake. Many car chases are not worth the risk of reckless driving. Some are initiated over crimes so small such as stolen jeans, as was the case earlier this summer in New York resulting in the death of an innocent woman.

Remember to always practice safe driving and if ever you find yourself the victim of a car accident due to reckless driving on the other party’s behalf, feel free to contact the Law Offices of Aronberg & Aronberg at 561-266-9191 or email us at daronberg@build.simple.biz.

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