Body count

Sarah Left contrasts the methods of calculating the number of protesters attending recent demonstrations

The Guardian
September 30, 2002
By Sarah Left

Organisers of last weekend's anti-war / pro-Palestine march reacted angrily to crowd estimates from Scotland Yard that placed only 150,000 people at the demonstration, against the Stop the War Coalition's estimate of 400,000.

The Metropolitan police admit that their method of counting is not an exact science. Stop the War based its calculations on the amount of time it took for the march to make its way up Whitehall (nearly five hours). Protest organisers also took into account people who skipped the march to arrive at Hyde Park in time for the speeches at 3pm (the last marchers did not leave the starting point at Embankment until just before 4pm).

Such a disparity in numbers - someone either invented 250,000 people or ignored their presence - leaves organisers frustrated. After all, one important measure of a demonstration's success is the number of people who turn up to deliver the message to politicians.

By contrast, the previous weekend both the Countryside Alliance and the police agreed on the CA tally of 407,791 marchers. Critics of the Liberty and Livelihood demonstration may accuse the police of bias towards middle class masses in tweed - but the CA put a great deal of organisation into producing an accurate count.

The CA used two teams of four people each to gauge the numbers passing a specific point during a three-minute period. The first group counted the number of people in a row across the width of Whitehall, and the second counted the number of individual people who passed the same point.

Using the average figure from each team of four counters, organisers could multiply the number of people in a row by the number of rows and come up with a fairly accurate count for a three-minute period.

The CA repeated the exercise every half hour and continually liased with police counters at a point about 800 yards down the road. The method still relied on a sympathetic count by police. If there had been a disagreement, the CA, for all its effort, could not claim the final tally was impartial.

There are ways to produce completely accurate, independent counts - it involves video snapshots of the crowd and a computer program that can count the heads - but these methods are expensive. The organiser of the CA march, Frances Hobbs, said he considered a computerised system but rejected that after seeing the bill: £94,000.

Short of paying an independent monitor to provide a march count both sides will accept, it seems the only thing a modestly funded group can do to make its numbers tally with Scotland Yard is to encourage protesters to wear tweed and vote Conservative.

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