how are protest turnouts actually counted anyway?

man in helicopter: "one million three thousand four hundred and two, one million three thousand four hundred and three — "
other man in helicopter: "here's yr tea bert"
first man in helicopter: "aargh you twat!! one, two, three...."

i wondered maybe if they take an aerial photo of streets filled and say "well, a waterloo-bridge-full = 5,500 plus a trafalgar-square's-full = 23,00 plus etc etc "

I don't know how they count, but that "750,000" that the Met Police came up with was ONLY people on the march, not the people who took "taxis for peace" straight to Hyde Park.

I think they have general ideas of how many people they can fit in certain streets... and then they can extrapolate...

yeah i was wondering this as well-police said eighty thousand in dublin,and organisers said over a hundred thousand...
dunno if there is some vaguely scientific work out roughly how many people are in a square of a certain size,and then divide the protest into squares of that size type thing going on,but even using that it must be impossible to get any sort of accuracy....

well i know i can fit three ppl in my bed if everyone breathes in so therefore there were two million and eight ppl on this march

actually we were worried the news wd be: "we were going to say two million but then we spotted this group of lightweights go into coffee republic for a cuppa so we're rounding down to 50,000"

Cnn is def. understating things a bit with this 'Hundreds of thousands worldwide...' stuff. But y'know... whatever...

Robin, thats how the National Park Service used to count marches in D.C. until the million man march. Then they just gave up.

It's a bit suspicious that whenever there's a protest for anything vaguely left-wing, the organisers' estimate is always at least double the police estimate; whereas at the Countryside Alliance march the estimates were practically equal.

hah AOL news has it listed as "thousands worldwide"

The countryside march had the ingenious counter on a bridge over Whitehall. It was used on all the TV coverage and the photos. Therefore the organiser's estimate ruled the media. I'd always split the difference

At one point in the rally the Glasgow woman said the BBC were counting ours at 97000, which surprised me as it was about the same as what she had said the organisers' own estimate was earlier on. Then I listened to the radio on my way home and the BBC were actually saying 35000. So maybe she was just quoting them quoting her. Another speaker had said the police were claiming 19000 (I think - possibly more) and said ha ha the police can't count. I have no idea how many there were. One, two, three, more than three.

Ken said the cops said a million. Assuming they did (it might not be), we can assume the cops would not round up - right?

I reckon the estimate, whatever it is must be quite good but the police will peg the figure down and the organizers will put it up.

so its prob somewhere in between.

There's an article about how attendance figures are calculated here. The answer seems to be guesswork based on previous guesswork.

I just got back from the NYC protest-- a "sidewalk march" that turned into an illegal march, tying up every major east side avenue through midtown. NYPD had a serpentine route that they forced marchers along, and I tried to ring it as much as possible. 1st and 2nd Aves were entirely filled with people from at least 49th Street through 63rd Street (almost 3/4 mile, and the avenues are maybe forty yards wide) and everything east of 5th Ave was teeming.

I saw more people there than at the Yankees tickertape gloat-fest in 1996 that the press estimated had 3.5 million people. Now, that number was blown ridiculously out of proportion, but the NY protests had many hundreds of thousands of people, most of which were forced into breaking the law by "obstructing traffic."

When I left, there were scenes of chaos at many intersections, including what seemed to be turning into a riot with a dozen or so horse-mounted cops trying to block several hundred (or more) people from pushing through barricades. Bloomberg really seems to have screwed up badly in denying the march permit, as the large numbers of people forced into tight spaces is totally unsafe.

The police take photos with spy planes and do a head count from those, before moving on to individual identification.

The organisers bring a step ladder and someone in a woolly hat climbs up and has a rough guess.