How many demonstrators marched in DC on 9/24?

[LiberalEsto]

The 100,000 figure being tossed around by the media is way off, as usual.

The Washington DC park police used to do crowd estimates many years ago, but stopped (or at least stopped announcing them) due to controversies over the numbers.

Yesterday Will Pitt reported on his protest blog that he had heard that CNN estimated the crowd at 600,000. But somehow that number sank and vanished, and was never mentioned again.

Today's Washington Post says protest organizers estimated a crowd of about 300,000. In the Post story, the DC police chief said the protesters reached their goal of 100,000 and probably achieved it. "Asked whether at least 150,000 showed up, the chief said, 'That's as good a guess as any.'"

During the Vietnam War era, we took the organizers' numbers, added them to the official police estimate, and divided by two to get what many of us felt was a fair estimate. Using that formula, 300,000 + 150,000= 450,000, divided by 2 = 225,000.

In another article about the Amtrak problems encountered by some would-be protesters coming from the Northeast, the Post reported that Metro ridership yesterday was 292,771, compared to a normal Saturday ridership of 173,572 as of 5 pm. So ridership was up by nearly 120,000.

Some of those passengers may have been heading to the national book festival or the green festival, but let's say nearly 100,000 passengers were headed to the protest via the Metro. Then add all the people who had arrived early and were staying in town, and the many thousands who came by bus or car or plane or train. I don't have figures for any of these, but I'm sure there were many people arriving by those means.

I wouldn't be surprised if we reached and surpassed 300,000 marchers.
I just wish the buttheads in the Misadministration were capable of listening to our message: Stop the war and bring our troops home!

[valerief]

1. I wonder what the total headcount worldwide was

I've read 100,000 for London. CSPAN said 500,000 for DC. 20,000 for SF. Thousands more in other major cities all around the nation and world.

I'll bet the number surpassed a million people!

[Maureen54]

2. I was there

We heard, from people who spoke with police, that there were between 500-600 thousand attending. All areas around the march were packed. The march, from where we stood, took two hours just to begin because of the amount of people. I believe the 600,000 estimated was accurate.
I heard on the News today that over 100,000 people were there....well over 100,000!

[newyawker99]

4. Hi Maureen54!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[jmatthan]

3. On my scale, 10 million

See

http://jmpolitics.blogspot.com

[texpatriot2004]

5. 300,000 to 500,000 (maybe more) marched at the White House n/t