Crowds of unruly teens overtake Pier Village in Long Branch
There are more police along the boardwalk in Long Branch after hundreds of teens converged on the shoretown Tuesday.
It’s happened again. As the weather warms up, another Jersey Shore town is overridden with crowds of badly behaving teens resulting in chaos and loads of police officers being called-on to settle the situation.
On Tuesday, Pier Village in Long Branch was location targeted.
Long Branch police had a very noticeable presence on the boardwalk on Wednesday. Officers examined every bag before anyone was allowed onto the sand.
Wednesday was calm compared with Tuesday when hundreds of people left the beach and took over the parking and common area within Pier Village.
News 12 spoke with one who was staying with his fiance at the Ocean Place Resort when the crowd started getting rowdy.
“It really was just a ton of people screaming, running, just jumping on top of cars, dancing on top of cars. It was just out of control," said Anthony Pizzi.
Pizzi, from East Hanover, says as the chaos continued the hotel management made a decision.
"The security for the resort came out and said that we had to get in the resort, they were locking it down and we ended up staying inside," said Pizzi.
A long time resident of Pier Village said he was happy to see police examining beach bags and coolers.
“Immensely it definitely helps. It keeps like the liquor and some of the other potential marijuana drugs off the beach so they’re not consuming that all day long. Because that could obviously fuel the fire a little bit," said George Nikolis.
It’s not the first time Long Branch has dealt with these unruly crowds.
Often teens are prompted through social media to go to a select shore town.
Seaside Heights and Wildwood have also had to deal with the crowds and fighting in past years.
Police arrested six people during Tuesday's event - two adults and four teens.
