Iraq

They stood up to be counted - and found nobody could agree on totals

John Vidal
February 17, 2003
The Guardian

When the march organisers announced at 3pm on Saturday afternoon that 1 million people had demonstrated in London, there were loud cheers. Two hours later, the "official" number had doubled and there was widespread disbelief. "How can anyone know?" asked one man who had just arrived. "They might as well say 5 million."

Yesterday the police admitted that after giving out figures ranging from 150,000 to 1.5 million or more on Saturday, they still had no idea how many people had actually descended on Hyde Park.

"The figures are a guide only," said a spokesman. "They should not be taken too literally. Perhaps it was 1.5 million."

Yesterday the numbers battle was being fought in newspapers with the anti-war Sunday Mirror, which had helped sponsor the rally, estimating 2 million, but the Sunday Telegraph just 500,000.

Other commentators estimated "more than 1 million". Worldwide, numbers of demonstrators varied wildly from 8 million to 30 million.

In the past, the police have said they use their long experience of previous public gatherings as a benchmark against which they estimate numbers. Yesterday they claimed to have used CCTV footage and helicopters to come to a figure.

"It's more than an educated guess, but less than a scientific figure. What we can say is that it was one of the largest [crowds] in living memory," said a police spokesman.

Demonstrators yesterday testified as to how impossible it would have been to count the numbers remotely accurately from aerial snapshots or crowd flows past certain points.

"People were still arriving in Hyde Park at 7pm, as others were going home. There was a constant flow of people to and from the park," said a member of one group which arrived after the speakers had left.

The police were anxious to play down accusations that they were manipulating figures. "We're not in the business of misleading the public. We employ the same methods with everyone," a spokesman said.

Even as far back as 1848 the Chartists estimated that 100,000 people had taken part in a London demonstration; police reckoned there were no more than 15,000.

Last year the police estimated that only 15,000 people had marched on the first major peace rally, while organisers had claimed 100,000.

At last year's Countryside Alliance rally, where police and organisers worked together for the first time and agreed a figure of about 400,000, a professional crowd-counting company slung a CCTV camera over the road and manual counters were used to measure the flow of people past several spots. Each marcher was also given a number.

"But even this was unreliable," said a spokesman for Intelligent Space, the company employed to calculate numbers at the Notting Hill carnival. There's a basic problem trying to accurately estimate anything on this scale. It's easy to double or even halve numbers without intending to."

To do a reasonably accurate count, he said, would need at least 12 trained people counting at different spots, the use of CCTV and aerial cameras, ideally calibrated with numbers using public transport and the records of coach and train companies.

"Counting large crowds is an embryonic science and little research has been done into large crowds. To be honest, the police methods are fairly approximate.

"It's a very big operation to count something so large remotely accurately. But I would say that 2 million people was pushing it."

© 2003 The Guardian