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How the police estimate crowd sizes

Posted by MDZS on 30 August, 2007 - 13:46 in
Interesting article on the BBC about how the police lie about crowd sizes on demos. Prompted by the 60,000 / 10,000 disparity between organisers and police estimates for the size of the Stop the War demo in Feb, the beeb asked the Met how they came up with their figure. Turns out their "10,000" was actually 12,000 and was actually an estimate of the maximum number of people in Trafalgar Square at any one time, not the size of the demo at all. And it was estimated by one person, based on the licencing capacity of the square. No sampling. No computer analysis of aerial photos. No thought that the licencing capacity might be based on health and safety rules, number of exits, not the number of people who will actually fit in the square. http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/london/2007/08/379941.html How many there ? A predictable feature of any demonstration is a large gap between the numbers said to be present by the Police and by the protest organisers. Take for example the Stop the War demo in London in February. The organisers spotted six times as many marchers as the Police did - they said 60,000, whereas the Police gave out a figure of 10,000. Estimating the size of a large, scattered, varying, unregimented and mobile crowd is a far from easy task. But a factor of six is a pretty big discrepancy too. The BBC put a freedom of information request to the Metropolitan Police for full details of the process used to calculate the numbers present at this demonstration.







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