That was my estimate of the numbers present at the pre-march rally, based on what I've seen on C-SPAN. I haven't gathered enough evidence to judge the size of the march, but if you grant that the march doubled the size of the rally, that still amounts to 20-25,000 people.
Remember that I've been to plenty of these marches in DC and attended the Million Man March and Promise Keepers rally which have taken place in similar areas that ANSWER has had demos on the Mall. There is research out there on crowd sizes. If you compare estimates of these huge rallies with ANSWER events held in similar spaces, you'll find that ANSWER always overinflates their numbers. ANSWER's estimates are never even close to the police estimates.
The area of the Mall where ANSWER held their rally yesterday holds about 30,000 to 40,000 people when packed full. The ANSWER rally didn't even fill a third of that space and the density of the rally was quite low.
What I've seen over the years is that most humans aren't very good at making estimates concerning large numbers. And we know that ANSWER has a proven track record of lying about attendance figures. Activists have nothing to gain from lying about the size of our events.
Doug Henwood wrote:
> A rare instance of Chuck0 & the cops seeing eye to eye?
Absolutely not. The cops later upped their estimate, which would make their estimate to be much higher than mine. I think the cops understand the politics of attendence figures and they understand that the powers that be desire that groups like ANSWER disempower the anti-war movement with their meaningless demos. I suspect that the cops are being overly generous with their estimate.
<< Chuck0 >>
Homepage -> http://chuck.mahost.org/ Infoshop.org -> http://www.infoshop.org/ Monumental Mistake (blog)-> http://chuck.mahost.org/weblog/index.php Practical Anarchy Online -> http://www.practicalanarchy.org/ MutualAid ISP -> http://www.mutualaid.org/ Infoshop Portal -> http://portal.infoshop.org/ Infoshop Science -> http://science.infoshop.org/ AIM: AgentHelloKitty
"...ironically, perhaps, the best organised dissenters in the world today are anarchists, who are busily undermining capitalism while the rest of the left is still trying to form committees."
-- Jeremy Hardy, The Guardian (UK)