for 15 billion tourism dollars a year. i walk through the broadway area on my way to 30 rock. we saw a lot of people out and about. a lot of tourists clearly congregating around some of the tourist spots. with that ubiquitousness of social media, now many of them are finding out what is happening in the subway, in brooklyn this morning, those scenes that we saw of people running out of a smoke filled subway car. let me go to vaughn hillyard who is with us. he has been checking out social media. he is new video to share with us. von, would ve you ve been able to find? yeah, chris, either been able to find? yeah, chris, ei ther as we continue to talk abot the shooter at large here and the threat that this individual could find. i think katie was saying this, we re talking about a 25 minute drive. a few subway stops away from manhattan, about five miles away from wall street, here. that s why when you watch the images from some of these
yesterday, president biden held a news conference on ghost guns because gun violence is on the there s concerns about getting out of worst violence with these un-registered guns that you can see at home. this is how everybody s moving forward, you can see the press lines moving forward, everybody gathers and inches. we have a news conference with the nypd at 11:45. so, we will get some more information, you can see that they re doing tests, right now. ron allen is my colleague at nbc news and msnbc, he s also on the news. ron, i know that you ve been here for quite some time. as i was walking through, i was talking to some residents in the neighborhood who said that they were in side when this happened, but they could hear the reaction, they could hear people running up from the subway and screaming and running down the street. what information do you have? it was a crazy scene, by all accounts. you know, this was it about 8:30 in the morning.
this is a very dense presidential neighborhood. there are a lot of small stores here, a lot of homes, apartment buildings. so, yes, this would ve been a very busy time in the day. and remember, the subway, it seems that they had the train coming in, in that most people that we talked to have no idea of why they have to it appears that it s a fairly random location. it seems there s nothing here that was targeted, necessarily. again, all of these questions [inaudible] the nypd, the first officers made contact over there. we were told that it would happen shortly. at this point, everything around here is just locked down. it is very . you can get anywhere. it s a huge crime scene area that stems for several blocks in both directions. around the city, there is a concern of whether this suspect
pretty quickly. cedric alexander, you have 40 years in law enforcement. you are obviously a law enforcement analyst for us. when the phone start ringing as they will when there is a briefing like this, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? how useful, generally, is it to have the phones start ringing like that? well, it s very important. when you have an incident like this where you have a potential loss of life, where you have injury, where you have fear and mayhem that is taking place in on american subway in this country, it is very important that the phones start raining and we start sharing information. more importantly, being able to share information as quickly and rapidly as you can and get information to the public that s going to be helpful to them. not just helpful, but also new york city is very smart about this. they are smart about getting information to the public. they are very smart about doing press conferences in a timely
manhattan, so there s a lot of questions about why here, why now? as you mentioned. there has been a rise in gun violence and violence in general in this city, especially on the subways, a lot of concerns about mental illness. there was a concern about a woman being pushed on the right track to few months ago, there s already a heightened level of concern for anybody who was riding the subway. i know how we talk about how the city has something of a shell of its former self because of the pandemic. it had started to come back to life. i took the subway every day. i had seen more people on the subway now than i have seen in many many months. it felt like it was starting to get back to something approximating the normal that we knew before. still not anywhere near the level of commuters on the subway as there was two years ago before the pandemic. ters on but certainly there aree now than ever, especially as the mask mandates have been eased, it s extra.