After police were called to incidents at three of the Jersey Shore’s most popular boardwalks over Memorial Day weekend, Gov. Phil Murphy on Tuesday rejected the characterization that this was a chaotic start to the summer at New Jersey’s beaches.
“On the one hand, you’re taking anything like anything like this deadly seriously,” Murphy said during his latest call-in television show on News 12 New Jersey. “We always have, and we always will.”
Murphy, though, pushed back against news coverage describing the events as chaos.
“The Shore did not have a chaotic weekend,” the governor said. “There were three very serious incidents. But this was overwhelmingly a huge Memorial Day.”
In Wildwood, police closed the boardwalk overnight Sunday and declared a state of emergency due to what police called “civil unrest,” after authorities said they received several complaints about an “extremely large number of young adults and juveniles.”
In Ocean City, a 15-year-old was stabbed on the boardwalk amid a larger fight Saturday night that ended with several arrests, police said.
In Seaside Heights, there was a false alarm of shots fired on Saturday night that sent people running. Police said the scene was cleared and there was no gunfire.
Murphy said officials “take all of those incidents very, very seriously, as I know the communities do.” He noted he personally spoke with the mayors of all three towns.
The governor also said he has been told the victim in the Ocean City stabbing is “doing well under the circumstances.”
“Having said that, the weekend was overwhelmingly a successful weekend, including overwhelmingly in those towns,” the governor added. “I was on a couple hours ago with the Wildwood mayor, and he said, ‘We had a fantastic weekend. We happened to have this overrunning of a bunch of teenagers.’”
“The sense we have based on all those metrics is this is gonna be the biggest summer ever.”
In a statement about the weekend incidents, Pete Andreyev, president of the New Jersey State PBA, said Tuesday that “our officers did an outstanding job handling out of control and unsupervised teens all along the Jersey Shore.”
“It will be a long summer if we don’t hold parents responsible,” Andreyev said. “We all deserve better.”
Asked if parents should be held responsible, Murphy said: “We all have to be. I’m a dad myself. You set the rules of the road and you hope your kids follow them. There’s no sense that I have whatsoever in any of these incidents that law enforcement didn’t do their job.”
The governor also noted that in Wildwood, one issue is the difficulty of finding enough special summer police officers, who wear uniforms but don’t carry a weapon, to help law enforcement.
“They’ve got a very low uptake this year,” he said. “That’s something we’re working on with the communities to make sure they’ve got the right level of manpower.”
Murphy was asked then asked what local and state officials can do to help prevent or combat such incidents. The Democratic governor noted he signed a law in January that makes it harder to charge police with depriving civil rights if they stop, search, or arrest minors suspected of possessing alcohol or weed in New Jersey. He said he signed it after complaints from local officials that “law enforcement didn’t have enough support, if you will, to intervene and go after folks — particularly teenagers in this case, underage, whether alcohol or cannabis — that were conducting illegal activities.”
“We think that has put us in a much better place than we were a couple of years ago,” Murphy said.
“It takes a village,” he added. “It’s law enforcement, it’s moms and dads, it’s the kids themselves, it’s their coaches, teachers. So let’s all come together here and make sure we have a great summer on the Shore and on our lakes.”
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Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on X at @johnsb01.