Gee, organizers of the peace marches around the world inflated the crowd sizes by 3 and 4 times the actual numbers. I guess the world says "no" to peace and "yes" to fuzzy math. Photos put peace marchers at 65,000 San Francisco -- A survey using sophisticated aerial photography of Sunday's anti-war march and rally in San Francisco has produced results that indicate a far smaller crowd than the 200,000 protesters estimated by police and event organizers. The results of the independent survey, commissioned by The Chronicle and SFGate.com, cast doubt on traditional counting methods and contradict the crowd estimate of 200,000, which was reported in this newspaper and news media around the world. Crowd size in a demonstration is important because organizers tend to use it as evidence of support for their cause.
Crowd estimates for large outdoor rallies, parades and the like almost always do for bullshit what Stonehenge did for rocks. The organizers always inflate the totals. Intelligent people (by and large) ignore them. (What the hell do I care how many people showed up for an anti-war rally? If it's 60k instead of 300k, all of a sudden I'm going to change my mind about the US invading Iraq?) Smug twits who oppose the organizers' agenda can be counted on to use the crowd-count inflation to score rhetorical points, and just never you mind why they're so silent when someone on their own side does the exact same thing.
We already knew that the counts were inflated but it would be nice to have better data than the guesses of the organizers and police. Did anyone else find this particular quote very silly? In London, Metropolitan Police in helicopters counted protesters in the streets based on the density of an average 10-by-10-yard square. That figure was then applied to the length of the march, said Alastair Campbell, police spokesman, in a Chronicle interview. Anyone with Stats 101 can poke truck size holes in that method. The information on how the Italians got their figure is not sufficient to judge but you've got to wonder. If we deflate all of the global protest numbers by a factor based on the SF example, we'd be talking about global numbers way below their goals. I agree that the actual numbers don't have an impact on my view of the war but it certainly does matter in the competing pr campaign. The protests were described by the media based in part on the argument that they were huge. Of course, since earlier marches were also biased it is hard to provide proper context to make (or refute) such a declaration. BTW, I'd like to see expansion of this technique (with some refinements) to all large public gatherings. I don't care if they are "for or against" my position, I prefer accuracy to guesses.