150,000 plus at today's demo

by Well done Sat Feb 15, 2003 21:08

Excellent turnout of all shades of people today. Sent a huge message to those in Government, who would have expected the crowd to be 5 or 6 times the pre-estimated crowd. Hopefully the numbers at the Shannon March 1st protest will be larger than last time too.

by even dan showed up!! Sat Feb 15, 2003 21:43

wow, that was the best protest ive ever been to. i couldnt believe when i saw all those people.just think the war hasnt started and the masses have already taken to the streets to show their opposition imagine what will hapen when/if they do attack!

by Eoin Dubsky Sat Feb 15, 2003 22:05

I was just there for the start of it. Well done everyone -- it totally rocked. Thanks too to the person who secured the good weather for the day! :)

by Donnacha - none Sat Feb 15, 2003 22:12 donnacha at sortedmagazine dot com London

Right, so we have 150,000 from the IAWM and 80,000 from RTÉ. That means somewhere around 120,000, right? London meeja's saying "over a million", with Stop the War saying 2m, so around 1.5m then.

D.

by Moirin Sun Feb 16, 2003 01:36

Please

by ? Sun Feb 16, 2003 02:06

33% of the popultaion of catalonia has marched today. 800,000 BCN 1,200,000 in other cities.

by kitty-kat Sun Feb 16, 2003 14:53

The Grassroots Gathering Network Against the War has called a demo down at Shannon on March 1st (back to the scene of the (govmnts) crime everybody!!!) The Irish Anti-War Movement is endorsing this call and there will be buses organised. for more details check out
gg-antiwar@yahoogroups and BE THERE!!!!
Fantastic Magnificent day good on EVERYONE

by people watcher Sun Feb 16, 2003 21:19

will the Fianna Fail gombeens who are selling out shannon and our neutrality chaNGE THEIR CORRUPT WAYS? i DOUBT IT

by King Mob Sun Feb 16, 2003 23:43

You just can't fucking help yourself can you.

It's not good enough that this march exceeded your wildest fucking expectations you JUST HAD TO BUMP IT UP SOME MORE.

Yes Aoife here after speaking to her bleeding bus driver came up with that figure.

Whats the matter 100,000+ not good enough for you?

Are you just a pathological liar?

You make me want to vomit.

by Queen Mob Sun Feb 16, 2003 23:57

"Are you just a pathological liar?" The only one who is a pathological liar is you King Mob.

by King Mob Mon Feb 17, 2003 00:44

Putting your money where your mouth is.

You've made plenty of accusations againist me my queen and you've not followed them up. So care to explain this one.

Aoife fucking knew the demo was 120,000 tops but the swp hack in her couldn't be awed by this staggering display they had to shove it up.

Fucking liars.

by Chekov Mon Feb 17, 2003 12:46

King Mob, it is very difficult to gauge the size of a crowd like that. I have seen no explanation of the methods used to calculate the crowd size of ANY of the estimates. Without a description of the methodology there is no real way to judge between the various estimates (I've heard 40,000, 50,000, 80,000, 100,000, 120,000, 130,000, 150,000). Sure Aoife's estimate is the high end of the scale but you can be pretty sure that most of the estimates are just guesses from people who have no experience in estimating marches on this scale (coz they don't happen here too often). So who's to say that 150,000 isn't more accurate than 100,000?

by Prince Mob Mon Feb 17, 2003 14:15

Instead of making a reasoned and rational reply to the original article you engaged in slanderous and libellous attack on Aoife (Yes, I got a solictor to check that out, and she's confirmed that it is a slanderous and libellous attack on Aoife), you engaged in a vicious rant that has all the hallmarks of a mentally unstable person. You must have a serious mental illness problem to constantly engage in slanderous and libellous vicious personal attacks day after day on Indymedia.

by King Mob Mon Feb 17, 2003 15:51

What are you going to do serve me with a writ?

Be away child you think I'm frightened?

I'm just poking a hole at all the fevoured egos blighting this movement.

And chekov mate c'mon SWP hacks also had a few zeros to their estimates, I'm just fucking staggered on such an amazing day with such a phenominal turn out that they couldn't just be happy with the real figure and they have to bloat and inflat it.

It's contemptable.

by Chekov Mon Feb 17, 2003 16:16

But I'd still like to see descriptions of the various counting methodologies used by the people who came up with estimates before denouncing them. It is possible for one person to come up with a reasonably accurate estimate of a crowd of up to say 10,000, merely by counting a subsection of the crowd and extrapolating but it is obviously impossible with crowds the size of that on Saturday.

So does anyone have any idea how anybody came up with any estimates? I actually suspect that nobody has a clue how many people there were and that 150,000 is as likely to be right as 40,000 is. Did anybody even try to count the crowd with any serious methodology or was everybody just rearranging their guesses based on what other people guessed (The media said 100,000 so there must have been 150,000, or the cops said 80,000 so there must have been 100,000, or the SWP said 150,000 so there could have been no more than 50,000...)?

by Phuq Hedd Mon Feb 17, 2003 22:38

Good article from Salon about methodology is doing the rounds. I repost in full because Salon requires you to login etc for all of the article, but the link is there for those that want it. Note that in San Francisco the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition hired a helicopter to take aerial photos as proof of crowd size.

By Michelle Goldberg SALON Jan 24

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.

Independent researchers can still use the Park Police's methods, though, and

that's what Clark McPhail did on Saturday. The counting formula divides the

mall into eight panels and measures the square footage of each. For really

huge protests, aerial photographs are necessary to determine how much space

is occupied, but Saturday's rally was small enough that McPhail and another

professor, John McCarthy of Pennsylvania State, could easily walk through the

gathering many times, noting its borders and its density.

A crowd of 500,000, he says, would have filled all eight panels, stretching

from the Capitol Building to the Lincoln Memorial, or from Third Street to

14th Street. Saturday's protest, he says, filled only one and a quarter

panel, and only a fraction of that was densely packed.

The first panel is bordered by Madison Drive on the north, Jefferson Drive on

the south, Third Street on the east, and Fourth Street on the west. McPhail

has measured it himself with a measuring wheel and says it's 365,000 square

feet, including the tree-lined areas in the north and south, which were

almost empty. The second panel, from Fourth Street to Fifth Street, is the

same size. It was only about a quarter full.

Once he's established square footage, McPhail establishes crowd density. In a

very crowded space -- say, the subway at rush hour or a packed elevator --

people usually occupy 2.5 square feet of space. McPhail used that number to

count people crowded around the stage toward the east end of the panel. That

crowd stretched back about 150 feet. Beyond that, the throng got looser --

people were still close together, but it was easy to move through them.

People in that kind of crowd take up about 5 square feet each, McPhail says.

Toward the back of the first panel and on the second panel, people were quite

spread out, standing in small clumps or milling about various literature

tables. There, McPhail says, people occupied about 10 square feet of space.

With such data, he says, estimating the crowd size is "really a junior high

school math problem." Thus, in first panel, "we had 66,633 feet at 2.5 square

feet per person, 43,921 square feet at 5 square feet per person, and 43,921

at 10 square feet per person." He also had 43,921 feet at 10 square feet per

person in the second panel.

From there, it's just a matter of division: 26,653 people in the most crowded

section, 8,784 in the moderately crowded section, and the same number spread

out in the back of the first panel and front of the second. That makes for a

total of 44,221.

McPhail took the measurements leading to that conclusion at 1 p.m., two hours

after the rally began. While he was measuring, a few last busloads of people

were still coming in -- as much as 10 percent of the rally. He also said it

was possible that another 10 percent joined the rally once the march began.

So to be on the safe side, he added 20 percent to his 1 p.m. total, which

yields 53,065. "Again, I think I'm being generous here," he says.

According to El-Baz, who has worked with the Park Service, aerial photographs

would have given a more accurate estimate. Still, he says, McPhail's method

is "the best that can be done under the circumstances without having an

imaging system. That certainly is the right way to do it, though it remains a

guesstimate."

The number even suggests that, contrary to previous reports, Saturday's

demonstration in San Francisco was larger than the one in D.C. There, police

originally estimated 55,000, based on the number of people in Civic Center.

After viewing aerial photographs of the crowds on the streets leading into

the plaza, the police upped their estimate to between 50,000 and 100,000, and

then said it could have been as large as 150,000.

That could mean that, unsurprisingly, the San Francisco Bay Area is more

liberal than the East Coast, or that the warm weather was more inviting than

the frigid cold in D.C. There's no way to know, since no one was using

McPhail's methodology there.

"I've been looking at demonstrations in Washington since 1967," McPhail says.

"I have a pretty good sense of how long it takes them to form. At the point

that we made the count it was pretty close to the upper limits, but it could

have been that people came on later, so that's the way I made these

estimations. I'm giving the organizers the benefit of the doubt."

He insists he's not trying to minimize what the protesters achieved. In fact,

he says, he thinks they do themselves a disservice by exaggerating. "While

hyperbole is to be expected from organizers -- it has always been higher than

the estimates of the police -- this can work to their disadvantage," he

writes in an e-mail. "For whatever it is worth, the composition of Saturday's

rally and march -- a lot of middle-aged and affluent folks -- was far more

interesting and impressive than the tens of thousands of people who were

present (and that is a not a number to be readily dismissed)."

Numbers, then, can suggest only so much. After all, by McPhail's calculations

there were 450,000 people at the Million Man March in 1995. That's less than

organizers expected or advertised, but still, by any measure, it was an

enormous crowd. Yet that group has not become a significant political force.

Meanwhile, he says, in the antiwar demonstrations of the '60s and early '70s,

the protests became effective once Middle America started turning out. At

that point, the size of the rallies mattered less than who attended. Once the

mainstream turned against the war, it had to end.

"In the Vietnam era, it was when middle-aged folks and middle-class folks,

doctors and lawyers began coming out and participating that public opinion

began to turn," he says. "I don't know if this will be a harbinger of a

similar kind of change or not, but I was really struck on Saturday by the

visible presence of a larger proportion of older people. I think it was

impressive."