Posted on 03/17/2003 7:13:00 AM PST by Andy from Beaverton
Crowd guess depends on who counts
03/17/03JOSEPH ROSE
While Portland police showed up in riot gear for Saturday's downtown antiwar march, there was one thing they wouldn't touch: Counting protesters.
Again, it was up to organizers and the media to do the politically sensitive, less-than-precise math problem of estimating crowds. And once again, the numbers didn't match. Demonstrators said as many as 45,000 people showed up. News outlets, including The Oregonian, said turnout was maybe 25,000.
Here's a number from 2,500 feet above the crowd: 14,200.
Attempting to come up with a more accurate count of Portland's fourth large-scale antiwar protest since October, The Oregonian used a sequence of gridded high-resolution aerial photographs to count heads. The survey showed 14,200 people marching from a rally at Tom McCall Waterfront Park into the downtown core at 3 p.m., when the gathering appeared to be at its peak.
Bergman Photographic Services, a Portland air photography company that has been taking photographs for government and private topographical maps since 1975, used a fixed camera mounted in the floor of an airplane that flew over the crowd.
Bruce Bergman, the company's co-owner and chief photographer, said the photographs are so accurate that a government agency was recently able to make a count of a Columbia River tern population by counting the birds' beaks.
The photographs from the weekend march were enlarged, allowing not only a count of marchers but also a view of spaces between them, which is difficult to see during a ground-level scan.
While the number can't be an exact count for the entire march, it does indicate a far smaller crowd than Saturday's estimates.
The Oregonian's count from the photographs included police officers and pedestrians on side streets blocks away from the main cluster of marchers. At the same time, it was impossible to know how many protesters attended only the rally before the march or joined the group later than 3 p.m.
Aerial photography or not, Will Seaman, one of the peace gathering's organizers, was skeptical of the findings. "We have some photos," he said. "We'll do our own count."
For march organizers, a strong turnout helps promote their cause. Seaman said organizer estimates of between 30,000 and 45,000 considered, among other things, the density of the crowd and the square footage it covered at the park during the rally, he said.
Coming up with a estimate can be as hard as trying to count ants running in and out of their hill. An Oregonian reporter stood on the street and counted how many marchers filled a block, then multiplied them, adjusting for large gaps.
The decision of Portland police to stop estimating crowds had nothing to do with war, peace, abortion, trade or saving whales. It was about saving themselves from the wrath of demonstrators.
Sgt. Brian Schmautz, a Portland police spokesman, found giving crowd estimates was a no-win situation. Earlier this year, fed up with being second-guessed and hounded by angry protesters accusing police of demeaning their cause by contradicting their numbers, he just stopped doing it.
"Sometimes people have an agenda and are unwilling to believe anyone who doesn't say what they say or believe what they believe," Schmautz said.
Another of Saturday's organizers, Mike Clayhold, said Portland Parks officials told him that the waterfront park space between the Morrison and Hawthorne bridges holds 70,000 people. Clayhold said the crowd filled three-quarters of that space, which was how he arrived at his "conservative" estimate of 45,000.
Aerial photographs taken 20 minutes after the rally started showed the number of people was closer to 10,000 at the time, with scattered groups of protesters beyond the clumps gathered near the stage.
Sarah Hughes, 23, of Olympia was in Portland visiting her boyfriend's family when she heard about Saturday's antiwar protest and decided to attend. Hughes said the media usually undercount the demonstrators at such events, which she said is all the more reason to add another body.
Asked to estimate the crowd, she said, "I don't know. I can't even guess. All I know is that (organizers) were predicting 40,000."
Roy Bell, 48, of Portland said he thought 40,000 people attended the demonstration. He said he knew what he was talking about because he attended the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. Police and media undercounted that event, he said. He said that in truth, it drew 1.2 million participants.
Ah, the Million Man March: The godfather of modern crowd-counting controversies.
The National Park Service calculated a crowd of 400,000 at the 1995 march. The agency caught so much flak that it decided it would no longer attempt estimates. Recently, a Boston University professor came up with an estimate of 878,587 using techniques similar to those used to count sand dunes in the desert.
In Portland, Pioneer Courthouse Square is one place where it seems everyone can agree on crowd sizes. When it's full, the square holds about 15,000 people, said event coordinator Stephanie Leeper.
Which raises the question: What methodology did the square's main office use to come up with that number? After looking for the answer, Leeper had to admit:
"Honestly, we don't know where that number came from," she said. "It's just been a number that has been passed down." Shelby Oppel of The Oregonian staff contributed to this story. Joseph Rose: 503-221-8029; josephrose@news.oregonian.com
Gee, do ya think?
Boy ! Now that's an exciting job ! ( must be government funded )
The Oregonian is part of Saddam's "useful idiots" team. Folks; is there any pro-troops/ FReeper Rallies planned for Portland? Please ping me to it, and add me to the list, if there is.
And, oh yeah...
Anything coming from the Oregonian is un-believable. Just when you get to know their warped ways, they try and through you for a loop.
Way ahead of you here. I ain't bought their paper since I acn't remember when.
And does that the "millions" of protestors are really four orders of magnitude less than the 249 million majority that didn't protest?
Well, believe it or not, the Oregonian actually endorsed GW for President in '00. (albeit somewhat luke-warmly)
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