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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Jakari Jackson reporting from Philadelphia. | |
| Now, right behind me, you can see the cement blockade National Guard troops standing by and way in the back, if you can see that white tent, that's where they are doing the TSA bag checks, just like we saw in Washington, D.C. Now, for all the places I've been, whether it's here in Philly, recently in Washington, New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, wherever else, the security I see here has dwarfed. | |
| Anything I've seen in those other cities as far as the way they are going about this. | |
| Last night, David Knight and myself exited our train station and we were out there in a taxi area waiting for a taxi and no taxis came. | |
| And one of the guardsmen said, oh yeah, they shut down the taxi service to this area. | |
| So then we had to walk. | |
| They had streets blocked off. | |
| They had some bridges blocked off to pedestrian foot traffic. | |
| You know, not even cars, they blocked it down so you could not even walk down the street in the United States of America. | |
| This wasn't one or two streets. | |
| What you see behind me is not a one-off event. | |
| If I go down the next street, there's a blockade. | |
| If I go blocks back, there's another blockade and another blockade and another blockade. | |
| So this is what we're having to deal with. | |
| But the point I was making with that is even though we had to walk from the train station to our hotel, what should have been a 45-minute walk. | |
| Turned out to be two hours and about 15 minutes. | |
| Because you couldn't walk straight down the street just like you see behind me. | |
| They had all these blockades. | |
| If you don't have a ticket, you can't get in. | |
| So this is the situation that we're dealing with here in the city of Philadelphia. | |
| And it's going to continue. | |
| I was talking to one of the ladies at our hotel. | |
| A lady who worked at the front desk. | |
| She said, yeah, I've never seen her like this. | |
| And in her opinion, it's quite ridiculous. | |
| And I would say that I do agree. | |
| Now, to be clear... | |
| All these security measures aren't the Pope's fault. | |
| I don't think he said put a checkpoint here, here, here, here, and here. | |
| I seriously doubt he did that. | |
| But it's just the old Rahm Emanuel quote, don't let a good crisis go to waste. | |
| These guys are taking advantage of the situation, you know, to fuel the military industrial complex. | |
| The guys who make these barriers, TSA checkpoints, all the guys who are there within, they're just taking advantage of the situation to come out here and just, you know, make money. | |
| So this is what we're dealing with out here. | |
| You can see there are people out here, but, you know, a lot of people being turned away. | |
| You know, many tourists hear many different dialects being spoken out here, many different languages. | |
| So people who just came in the city, whether to see the Pope or for other means, if they don't have a ticket, they're not getting anywhere close to him. |
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