Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Organizers exaggerate turnout. Police play it down. Last Saturday's antiwar rallies raised the question: Isn't there a way to count crowds? There is, but nobody wants to use it.
Jan 24, 2003 | Crowd estimates for Saturday's antiwar demonstration in Washington are almost as contentious as the debate over the war itself. U.S. Capitol Police put the number at 30,000 to 50,000 and were promptly accused of low-balling the turnout by members of ANSWER, the march's organizers, who initially estimated that 200,000 people attended and then bumped it up to a half million. Most of the media went with a safe "tens of thousands," but a few took ANSWER at its word: The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that "as many as 500,000" people marched in D.C.
The politics of the numbers game is obvious. War supporters repeat the low figure to insist that the peace movement lacks a broad base, while antiwar activists use the high number to argue that America is rising up against an Iraq invasion. The same battle lines stretch back at least as far as the Vietnam War, and every time there's a sizable march in the nation's capital the same question arises: Isn't there some way to quantify the size of the crowds that throng to Washington in times of ferment?
In fact, there is. Clark McPhail, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of America's preeminent authorities on protest crowds. His award-winning 1991 book on crowd behavior, "The Myth of the Madding Crowd," is required reading in his field. When the Washington Post wanted to estimate the numbers at the massive Promise Keepers march in 1996, they hired him on the Park Police's recommendation. He attended last Saturday's antiwar demonstration, and according to him, there were 60,000 protesters. Tops.
That will sound low to a lot of people. Larry Holmes, a spokesman for ANSWER, called it "a little bit on the ridiculous side" and suggested McPhail's motivations are "political." But Joel Best, the University of Delaware sociology professor who wrote "Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers From the Media, Politicians and Activists," calls McPhail "the expert on this stuff." And McPhail insists his estimation methodology has nothing to do with politics. He's been studying D.C. demonstrations since 1967, using a fairly simple mathematical formula -- square footage divided by occupation density -- to count everything from antiwar gatherings to the annual March for Life to the Million Man March to Promise Keepers ... and last week's D.C. rally.
"Believe me, I was not trying to lowball," he says. "I have been consistently surprised at the difference between eyeballing these things and what this square footage divided by occupation density equation yields."
ANSWER admits its 500,000 was no more than an eyeball estimate. "We arrived at it because it was easy to see from the stage that the numbers were at least twice as large as Oct. 26, and it was our serious estimate that we had a couple of hundred thousand then," Holmes says.
But McPhail says such eyeball estimates are usually wrong. The crowd-counting method he uses, he says, was devised by Berkeley journalism professor Herbert Jacobs in the 1960s during the Free Speech movement. Sproul Plaza, where the protests were held, was made of concrete poured in uniform sections. By measuring the sections, estimating the crowd density and counting how many sections were filled, Jacobs was able to come up with fairly reliable numbers. Farouk El-Baz, director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, says that the methodology is well known and well respected by scientists.
The Park Police used to use it to make protest-crowd estimates, but the issue became so contentious they got out of the crowd-estimate business entirely, after Louis Farrakhan threatened to sue when the agency said there were only 400,000 people at his 1995 Million Man March. To avoid such threats, Congress banned the Park Police from counting crowds at future demonstrations.
