Crowd count adds up to infinite interpretation
By J. Patrick Coolican
Seattle Times Eastside bureau
It may seem like counting swarming bees in a hive, but estimating the size of a crowd — such as the one that marched in downtown Seattle on Saturday against a possible war in Iraq — is a science, if still an uncertain one, according to experts who study crowds.
For march organizers of any kind, the stakes are high; so high, experts say, they may count invisible bodies, even if unintentionally.
Saturday's robust numbers mean lots of ordinary people came out, a signal the anti-war message has significant mainstream appeal, said Howard Gale, a spokesman for Sound NonviolentOpponents of War, one of the march's organizers.
"Seeing this outpouring makes people watching on TV start to question what's happening," he said. His estimate: 50,000 to 60,000.
Seattle police officials were far more conservative, using officers on the ground and aerial estimates of the Washington State Patrol to put the number at 15,000 to 20,000.
A spokeswoman said officers compared the size of the crowd with the size of a crowd at KeyArena, which holds about 17,000. That method wouldn't inspire confidence in very many scientists.
Everyone seems to have his or her own method. One protester counted how many people passed a certain location during a minute (400) and multiplied that by the march time (120 minutes). Result: 48,000.
A Seattle Times reporter counted the number of people per row times the number of rows assembled at Seattle Center and came up with 28,800.
So who's right?
"If you want a precise count, you run people through a turnstile, but then people would say the turnstile was rigged," joked Clark McPhail, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois. He wrote an award-winning book on crowds and helped The Washington Post count the 1997 Promise Keepers march in Washington, D.C.
The accepted method in the field, he said, is to measure the size of an area, determine how much of it is occupied, then measure the density of occupation — i.e. how many people are packed into a specific-sized area.
The method was devised in the 1960s and then used by the U.S. Park Police. The agency stopped reporting its crowd estimates on orders from Congress, after Louis Farrakhan threatened to sue when it concluded the 1995 Million Man March in Washington was more like a 400,000-man march.
A Boston University geologist uses the same method, but a different data-collection technique. Farouk El-Baz, director of the Center for Remote Sensing, used digitized aerial images to count 837,000 heads in the Million Man March, with a margin of error of 20 percent — a clear indication of how inexact the science is.
El-Baz used the photos to break down Washington's National Mall into areas of various densities, which he then added together.
McPhail declined to comment on El-Baz's method, but said, "to estimate density, you need people on the ground. You almost have to walk through to get an estimate of how dense the crowd is."
McPhail used 60 researchers at the scene to determine the density of the Promise Keepers demonstration.
To count Mardi Gras revelers, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the city of New Orleans has trouble counting all the people bar-hopping, so it adds a unique variable to its estimate: tons of trash.
In this murky field, one thing is fairly clear: Organizers often overestimate, McPhail said.
He estimated the size of last month's anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., to be 60,000 at most, a little more than one-tenth the organizer's estimate of 500,000.
March organizers are inherently biased observers, McPhail noted. Think of a parent keeping score at her child's ballgame. "It's to their advantage to have a larger number, so the numbers they tout are a socially constructed estimation."
McPhail said he once thought police deliberately low-balled crowd estimates because they were more likely to be politically conservative; then he realized their estimates were smaller for marches of both politically left and right groups.
One reason organizers may overestimate their crowds, McPhail said, is something physicists call foreshortened perspective.
Imagine being on a beach and seeing a small group of people a few hundred yards away. They will clump together and look like a larger mass than they are. A march organizer at the head may look toward the tail and think the crowd at the back is as dense as at the front.
"I don't think they're fabricators," McPhail said, "but they are in the business of propagandizing."
archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com
(I posted this earlier to PT)
and also look at the Human Rights Watch (no friend to the US) and their view of Iraq and the UN in the snip I copied titled: The Failure of the UN to Act--- there are accounts of inaction and atrocities that these peace marching dove brained idealists apparently condone - they march for Sadam. Also in Human Rights Watch is links year by year through the Bubba years of pleas of help that went on deaf ears.
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