I remember going up and down my street in 1978, the last year with snowfall like this in New Jersey, doing much the same as these teenagers. My dad had taught me a month before how to put the snowplow blade on our riding lawnmower, and I was sure going to make some money off of that. Back then I lived about 10 miles from where these teenagers are.

I don't think the police did anything wrong. They responded to a call from a citizen.
The insanity here was the reaction from the media

I wonder why the person who called police thought they were "suspicious". I guess it's a good thing they weren't black.

Too many laws from the nanny state of ( insert state of your choice.)
Damn bureaucrats.

"He said other news media outlets had skewed the story: “They twisted this into an antipolice thing,” he said. “It wasn’t the police’s fault — they were just doing their job.”

Michael Jannone, chief of the Bound Brook Police Department, said the verbal attacks on his department from outraged people across the country had been “vicious.”

“We’ve been called everything from fascists to Nazis to Gestapo,” Chief Jannone said.

“Our officers were never going to give them a ticket for that,” he added. “I can’t even count the number of times I’ve paid $5 for a cup of lemonade from a lemonade stand — I didn’t tell those kids to get a permit either.”

Chief Jannone said the danger from the storm was real: About three minutes after the officers had left the shovelers, their patrol car slid in the snow into a telephone pole, causing $11,000 worth of damage."

When are we going to learn that the police will take any law intended for one thing and use it against something entirely innocent. It's a good thing the boys didn't have anything on them that resembled a gun. As to travel bans (i.e., martial law imposed for a snow storm) I've been driving since 1956 in every kind of weather imaginable and I've never wrecked a car nor been stuck. I think the Chief's patrolmen could use some driving lessons and some common sense lessons.

These laws that keep willing producers and buyers apart are there to protect established businesses from competitors who might find a way to serve customers better. This one case is no big deal but it's an example of a broader problem of it being the somewhat-accepted norm for govt to get in the way of the economy.