Last Saturday in front of the United States Capitol, protesters, including over 100 Georgetown students, demonstrated against the impending war against Iraq. Lots of protesters. Just how many protesters, or even a rough approximation of the number, nobody knows. Published estimates ranged from 30,000 to 500,000. The lower figure was attributed to an anonymous comment overheard by U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, while the higher one was shouted errantly from the stage by a speaker representing Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, an activist coalition which organized the protests.
Some professional observers were loath to even venture a guess. In the Washington Post, Metropolitan Police Chief Charles Ramsey declined to estimate an exact number, and instead mentioned “an awful lot of people.” Most observations came in between 100,000 and 200,000, but even those numbers are conjectures based on little actual evidence.
Until 1995, the U.S. Park Police, an objective and apolitical source which oversaw security for the Mall and its environs, made official estimates of crowd size using aerial photographs. Estimating crowd density and then simply doing the math was a simple if imprecise method of determining crowd size. Though often labeled conservative, the estimates at least served as a minimum number that everyone accepted and could compare to estimates of previous protests conducted using the same methods. Well, almost everyone.
Park Police estimates ended when Louis Farrakhan threatened to sue the group after the Park Police approximated that his Nation of Islam-organized Million Man March only measured 400,000 or so attendees. The ensuing media circus ultimately lead Congress to suspend the Park Police estimates indefinitely.
Why are numbers so important? To many, the figures are a gauge of an issue’s viability and support within society, a sort of representative popular vote. Lacking any mathematically determined estimate from an unbiased source only detracts from the importance of debate surrounding the real issue at stake, in this case, the war in Iraq. Case in point: The Washington Post printed a front page story on the various estimates for the size of the rally, using space that could have been devoted to discuss the protest’s message.
The technology to allow a highly precise estimation, using satellite imaging or high-resolution aerial photography and computer analysis, is readily available and it would allow for a more unbiased estimate than random observations. Congress should allow the Park Police to resume the use of objective methods for counting protesters, and pass legislation protecting them from spurious threats of lawsuit for its purely informational estimates. That way, more emphasis will be placed on debating the issues at hand.
