Response was to incidents of teens fighting on boardwalk over Memorial Day weekend
OCEAN CITY — At a press conference Thursday afternoon to show Ocean City is a safe place to live and vacation, Assemblyman Antwan McClellan put things in perspective.
Referencing videos that swirled around social media showing teens fighting on the boardwalk over Memorial Day weekend, the Ocean City native said, “You’re standing here in America’s Greatest Family Resort, one of the best beaches in this country. That’s what we should be talking about the week after Memorial Day — all the people who were here and had a good time. Instead we’re talking about the people who did some bad things.”
Those bad things included fights and a 15-year-old being stabbed that caused short-lived chaos on the boardwalk. In spite of an exceptionally busy holiday weekend for the police, things were back to normal quickly after the main incident and for the vast majority of the weekend, officials said.
Such is the power of a few video clips on social media to quickly make a bad impression that officials wanted just as quickly to dispel.
McClellan, Mayor Jay Gillian, Ocean City Police Chief Bill Campbell and Leonard Desiderio, director of the Cape May County Board of County Commissioners, surrounded by the rest of the County Commission and members of Ocean City Council, spent 20 minutes in front of about a dozen local and regional media members on the boardwalk by the Ocean City Music Pier.
Their goal? To dispel fears, lament 2020 changes in state law that “handcuff the police” when dealing with unruly teens, discuss ordinances approved in the past two years to make the boardwalk and beach safer, and announce how the city will be adding an extra 20 seasonal police officers to patrol the boardwalk through Labor Day.
“Ocean City will always remain a family-friendly town,” Gillian said in opening the press conference. Calling the holiday weekend incidents “unacceptable,” he said the fact people on the boardwalk were back to enjoying themselves shortly afterward was a testament to the police department.
He reiterated what the city has done to be proactive over the past two years, including an 8 p.m. beach curfew, 11 p.m. curfew for juveniles citywide and a backpack ban evenings on the boardwalk. Gillian said the city has added full-time police officers and seasonal officers and “now has one of the largest forces of seasonal officers in the state.”
He pointed out the men and women of the OCPD transported 23 teens to the police station because of fights, shoplifting and other infractions and issued more than 1,300 curbside warnings for violations including alcohol and cannabis.
“Everybody who loves Ocean City can rest assured that this summer will be a great one,” Gillian said, noting all the officials gathered were there to show they take public safety “very, very seriously.”
While noting as mayor he takes responsibility for what happens, “It’s up to all of us to make sure that our kids and everybody we come in contact with, we educate them on how important it is to be accountable and be a good person,” not to come to the city and cause problems.
“We are Ocean City. We are the safest town,” he said. “That’s why people come here and we want to continue it.”
Over the past three years, McClellan said, he, Assemblyman Erik Simonsen and state Sen. Mike Testa — New Jersey’s First District legislators — have been working with mayors and commissioners to see what they can do about bad-behaving teens on the boardwalks. They came up with legislation but there was a conditional veto by Gov. Phil Murphy to “make it more friendly and not give the police the power and authority they needed.”
Although the three legislators are Republicans, he said this isn’t a partisan issue, with problems up an down the coast. That was a fact over the holiday weekend with Wildwood instituting a state of emergency and emptying its boardwalk and incidents in seaside towns to the north.
“We’re going to continue to fight as a legislature to make sure that this doesn’t continue to happen,” McClellan said, working with the state Police Benevolent Association (PBA) to come up with rules that allow police to talk to teens, which they can’t do in many instances.
“If they’re doing something illegal, the police cannot talk to them. The teens are walking around and are not required to show ID,” he said, adding they can give fake names and addresses.
“We’re going to make sure police can talk to the teenagers and report to the parents. It’s not about arresting anybody, giving anybody a record,” he said. “It’s about allowing the parents to know what these teens are doing on the boardwalks.”
Desiderio said the Prosecutor’s Office as well as the Sheriff’s Department will supplement the Ocean City Police Department and any community in Cape May County when needed.
He agreed with McClellan that he didn’t want young people to get police records, but he warned them not to come to Cape May County if they plan to cause problems.
“We’re working with our legislators to help give the police some more protection, the tools that they need. Unfortunately, what the attorney general did at the time (2020) was put the handcuffs on the police officers,” he said.
“We don’t want to give any of these kids a record. We want them to grow up to be law-abiding citizens and go to college if they choose and get good jobs. We want them to be productive citizens, but they can’t come to our county and disrupt things. We are not going to allow it.”
He commended the OCPD and Chief Campbell, saying they did an “amazing job,” took care of the problem and people went right back to having fun.
“We’re not going to tolerate any B.S. … and we’re going to ask the parents to please keep an eye on your kids. Not all of these kids are bad; 95 percent of them are great. It’s only a small percentage that stir things up and cause problems and make things bad for everyone else,” Desiderio said.
“We’re asking the parents to keep an eye on your 15- or 16-year-old kid. When it’s 10 o’clock, ask, ‘Do you know where they are?’ And I think things will be better.”
The police chief took questions and said Ocean City is “absolutely safe.”
He also wanted to put things in perspective.
Campbell said in the videos that circulated of the fight, it was between groups of juveniles who were familiar with each other, that it was a “targeted engagement” between them and that no other residents or visitors were attacked.
“This was a specific group with the intent of carrying out this fight,” he said. “Once this group was under control, taken into custody and removed from the boardwalk, order and civility was restored in 60 to 90 minutes.
The juveniles were from Atlantic City, Pleasantville and Mays Landing and the investigation into the stabbing remains active in conjunction with the Cape May County Prosecutor’s Office. There has been no arrest in that case so far.
When asked if the officials were sending a message to those from Atlantic County, Campbell replied, “We welcome everybody here. What the mayor said is if you come here, you need to behave, follow the laws, not break the laws, not cause the type of incidents we witnessed last weekend — the chaos and confusion for all the visitors and people up here that caused the videos to go viral.”
He also noted this weekend was not worse than previous holiday weekends.
Campbell said the staffing by the police and its operations were sufficient to handle what transpired over the holiday and what may come, but they could make adjustments if needed. Staffing, however, “is not an issue.”
He said it would help to make it illegal for juveniles under 21 to smoke marijuana and drink alcohol. Currently, police can only confiscate what they see in public and issue warnings.
Twenty-four seasonal officers were to graduate this week and 20 would be assigned to the boardwalk.
Mayor Gillian noted the press conference was on the boardwalk because they were addressing the incidents on video, but they are just as concerned with what happens elsewhere in the city. He asked for the public’s help.
“If you see a group of kids drinking, call the police department. … It takes a community to stop these kinds of things.”
– PHOTOS and STORY by DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff