Video shows New Jersey cop punching a woman suspected of underage drinking at the beach

The mayor of Wildwood, New Jersey, said police officers “were just doing their jobs” when one cop punched a 20-year-old woman repeatedly after she allegedly resisted arrest for underage drinking.

In a video posted to Twitter on Saturday, a Wildwood police officer is shown punching a young woman in her head and neck multiple times before wrestling her into the sand and handcuffing her.

In a now-deleted Facebook post, Emily Weinman, a 20-year-old from Philadelphia, said she went to the beach with her daughter, her father, and a friend for Memorial Day weekend. She said she'd brought alcohol but wasn’t drinking when two police officers approached her on their four-wheelers and asked how old they were. They told them their ages.

“Then, we got breathalized [sic], and it came back negative,” Weinman wrote on Facebook, according to Philadelphia ABC affiliate WPVI. “I told them I wasn't drinking and the alcohol was clearly closed/sealed, which the cops seen.”

Weinman said she walked away from the officer then, tried to make a phone call, and asked them why they didn’t have anything better to do than stop people from drinking underage on the beach. She wrote that the police officer asked for her name, and she refused. That’s when the incident became physical, NJ.com reported.

Then the officers attempted to arrest Weinman on suspicion that she had been drinking underage, according to the City of Wildwood Police Department. The police officers can be seen dragging her to the ground and hitting her at least twice in the head and neck.

Several of the other beachgoers began crowding the scene and can be heard warning Weinman to “stop resisting.”

She shouts, multiple times, “You’re not allowed to hit me and choke me like that,” and “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Wildwood Mayor Ernie Troiano Jr. told NJ.com on Monday the cops “were just doing their jobs,” while conceding he had not seen the video.

“People come down here to have a good time and we want them to have a good time, but we also want them to obey the laws,” Troiano said. “That is not a hard thing to do. Just obey the laws. It is amazing the amount of people that just believe they can drink. It is amazing the amount of kids who come down here and just feel like the law doesn't pertain to them.”

The video doesn’t show what happened to Weinman before the incident got physical, but Alexis Hewitt, the woman who tweeted the video of the incident, wrote that she was sleeping when she woke up to the police struggling with Weinman. The video has been watched more than 6 million times.

“When she fell, that’s basically when it caught my eye because everyone was yelling and I woke up, and I got my camera out right when she went down,” Hewitt told Philadelphia ABC affiliate WPVI.

Wildwood Police Chief Robert Regalbuto called the video “alarming” in a press statement, and said he “does not want to rush to any judgement until having the final results of the investigation.”

“An Internal Affairs Investigation was immediately initiated into this matter and the involved officers have been re-assigned to administrative duty pending the outcome of a full and thorough investigation,” the department wrote in a statement on Facebook.

Weinman was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, minor in possession of alcohol, two counts of aggravated assault for spitting at a police officer, and obstruction, according to the City of Wildwood Police Department.

Cover image: Twitter