Newport Beach assessing chaotic July 4, what drew crowds to the city

After arresting some 400 people in response to disruption and chaos on the Fourth of July, Newport Beach officials are tracking where the revelers came from and what drew them to the coastal town.

City Manager Seimone Jurjis said he spent Monday morning, July 6, looking at the reports from the Saturday mayhem authorities responded to on the Balboa Peninsula, where officials say large groups of young people — mostly ages 15 to 25 — refused to listen to police orders to disperse.

Of the 400 people arrested, Jurjis said it appears a large majority were visiting from Arizona, though he added that isn’t to say there weren’t people from Southern California. Details from the weekend were still being processed Monday, just a day and a half after the unrest, he said.

In 2025, the city arrested about 500 people throughout the Spring Break season, seeing wave after wave of students on vacation flooding the beach town, they said, and then another 79 over the July 4 weekend. So Newport Beach leaders said they spent the last year preparing for the revelers with new rules in place allowing enforcement of violations to address bad behavior.

Now city officials will be reviewing their response, Jurjis said, considering their own messaging, the impact of social media influencers and next steps, which will be discussed next week at the City Council meeting.

“We need to assess what is working, what doesn’t work, and how do we continue to improve as we go forward,” Jurjis said.

Among the next steps, he said, will likely be reaching out to the governor of Arizona and, if necessary, to some of the Arizona universities, if there is a link indicating that those arrested are students there.

Part of what is prompting interest in Newport Beach, Jurjis said he believes, is social media influencers who visit and draw others to the area, but he added that he and others at the city are doing “mental gymnastics” to figure out exactly what is spurring the influx to Newport Beach.

“Is it the taunting of ‘Not in Newport,’” he said, referencing a recent campaign by Mayor Lauren Kleiman on the city’s Instagram account, asking the public for good and polite behavior. “Newport is one city, but there are thousands of social media influencers out there.

“You have all the influencers that are influencing the kids to come to Newport Beach and you have people that are here from Newport Beach, from Arizona, that are streaming on TikTok to come to certain parts of the beach,” Jurjis said. “That’s where we need to focus our attention and not whether our ‘Not in Newport Beach’ campaign is reverse psychology or is taunting.”

“We’ve created a beautiful town for beaches, we upkeep it, there’s an affluent lifestyle to Newport Beach, and social media influencers are going around talking ‘Go to Newport Beach to have your party,’” he added. “That’s what’s driving a lot of this. Phoenix is hot, and it’s rough there. That’s what we had during Spring Break. There wasn’t a lot of snow in the mountains, and there was hot weather in Arizona and Nevada, and you didn’t have that influx into Mexico.”

Zach Zaiden, 24, of Huntington Beach, was among those who posted on TikTok about going to Newport Beach on the Fourth of July.

“I am fired up for the Fourth tomorrow,” he says in the video, taken at Angel Stadium.

“See you all in Newport tomorrow,” a friend says.

On Monday, Zaiden said he did go to Newport Beach during the holiday and was caught in what he called “absolute chaos” as he, his sister and a friend attempted to ride their bicycles back home to Huntington Beach. He did not go to Newport Beach for the gathering that drew hundreds of officers from around Orange County, he said.

“We just saw a bunch of people posting about going to Newport Beach,” he said of their video. “Being a local to this area, we just thought it was funny.”

Plenty of videos had been popping up on his feed, he said.

Zaiden went to a friend’s house party on 33rd Street, then about 2 p.m., rode his bike down to the Wedge, he said, where he saw the beach “already starting to fill up.”

Police officers closed the bike path and when it was time to go home, Zaiden said the trio had to traverse through alleys until they got to 48th Street to get out of the area.

“We saw kids from 16 to mid-20s,” Zaiden said. “There were thousands, mainly guys, just trying to start stuff, definitely not with good intentions,” including some who threw mortars.

Zaiden said he believed many were not from the area.

“Being from Orange County, we value our police officers so much,” he said. “We would tell them ‘We appreciate you’ and then have other people asking us why we were saying that.”

Newport Beach police declined to offer further information, with a spokesperson referring questions to City Hall.

Newport Beach had extra law enforcement out, and officials felt like they were keeping things under control on Thursday and Friday, but things began to escalate by Saturday, Jurjis said.

During Saturday afternoon, with tens of thousands of visitors already at the beach, the situation grew more intense as social media posts drew an “invasion” of juveniles and young adults to the Newport Pier area in a short time, Jurjis said.

As the crowd rapidly grew, individuals engaged in increasingly dangerous and unlawful behavior, blocking roadways, restricting emergency vehicle access and throwing explosive mortars, fireworks and other projectiles at police officers, into densely packed crowds and near families with children, he said. The Pavilions supermarket on West Balboa Boulevard was ransacked at one point.

It became so disruptive that Newport Beach police officers got assistance from nearby communities after sending out a request, including the Huntington Beach Police Department SWAT team and the departments of Orange, Brea, Seal Beach, and La Habra, Jurjis said.

“It was a pretty impressive show of force,” he said. “It was about keeping the peace, getting them to disperse. They were blocking the roadways and preventing emergency access. Even when you have thousands getting into their car and leaving, you still always have that minority that wants to be disruptive.”

When a group of juveniles and young adults near 28th Street on the peninsula refused to leave the area near the pier, 200 were encircled by police and arrested, Jurjis said.

It took police officers all night to book those being arrested, and once they had been processed, they were loaded on an OCTA bus and taken to jail.

This is a developing story, please check back for updates.