“It’s maddening,” D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) told reporters Monday when asked about the incident, adding the word “foolish” to her list of descriptors. She added that she “doesn’t know why people think it’s fun to terrorize” motorists and pedestrians.

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Police said they are compiling photos of people who might have been involved and will make them public soon.

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Dirt bike and ATV riders have challenged police agencies from the District to Baltimore in recent years. They typically ride in packs, flouting traffic laws, using sidewalks in addition to roads and darting in and out of traffic while performing stunts.

In 2015, a group of bikers brought traffic on the Capital Beltway in Maryland to a crawl while they popped wheelies, drove the wrong way and laid skid marks with such aggression that plumes of smoke rose from the highway.

Police in most jurisdictions forbid officers from pursuing the bikers, saying it’s too dangerous and the likelihood of catching them is remote.

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Lawmakers in Baltimore have floated the idea of building an off-road track, tried boxing the riders into geographic areas and made it illegal to gas up the off-road bikes at stations. In the District, police use surveillance video and photos to try to identify the bikers long after they’ve passed through a neighborhood and sometimes crush the illegal bikes after they’ve been seized.

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D.C. police said that since Aug. 25, 2018, they have arrested 52 people on charges related to driving dirt bikes and ATVs. Nearly two-thirds of those arrests have occurred this year.

The group that came through the District on Sunday evening was sizable, and it traveled through an area where many people were out enjoying a pleasant evening.

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The man who was injured in the altercation did not respond to interview requests.

Five witnesses said the man was crossing 14th Street in a crosswalk and headed “into a crowd of dirt bikes” and ATVs, according to a police report. The witnesses, who were not identified, told police that the man pushed a rider off a bike.

That rider then “got up from his motorbike and punched” the man in the face, bloodying his mouth, an act the witnesses described as retaliation, the report said. According to the report, witnesses said another person came up behind the pedestrian and “punched him in the back of the head.”

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The assailants then fled south on 14th Street. The victim was treated at a hospital.

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Residents and bystanders went on social media to comment on the dirt bikes and note the large police presence that raced to the scene of the dispute. Videos show a large group of bikers later heading into the Crystal City area of Arlington, Va.