I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Albuquerque Tea Party organizers estimated that a crowd of 12,000 people attended the tax day tea party protest. They passed out stickers to attendees of the tea party protest to count them. “Exactly 9,028 stickers were handed out at the event. Based on that number, the ATP is officially estimating the crowd at 12,000,” the Albuquerque Tea Party press release stated.
But was this number accurate?
Any time a question of crowd size happens, it reminds me of how John Fleck, the science writer for the Albuquerque Journal, helped debunk the notion that one-million people watch the Rose Bowl Parade every year. Those gathered to watch the Rose Bowl were much closer to 100,000 than the 1 million that Rose Bowl organizers loved to claim.
In 2005, the Boston Globe wrote an article about how crowd estimates are often not accurate.
The accepted method for estimating crowd size is to measure the size of an area, determine how much of it is occupied, then measure the density of occupation. That method, which McPhail refers to as “the gold standard” for gaining an accurate crowd count, was devised by the US Park Police during the 1960s Vietnam War protests.
This is most easily done with aerial footage (to see the entire crowd).
For the Albuquerque Tea Party protest, KOAT was the only TV station to fly a helicopter overhead, but did not show a full shot of the crowd, so we must resort to back of the envelope calculations that I am employing here.
For the math, I looked and found this from the LA Times which explained the math of counting crowds standing on the sidewalks:
The route is 5.5 miles long, or 29,040 feet. So, if you allowed two feet per person, for spectators standing shoulder-to-shoulder, it would take 29,040 people to form one row of spectators along both sides of the entire parade route.
OK, so we get the number — two feet per person for people standing shoulder-to-shoulder. If you can convince your family members to stand next to each other and measure out two feet (if you have kitchen tiles, this is easier to calculate), you’ll find that two feet is pretty snug.
From San Pedro to Wyoming, the area tea party organizers say the protesters covered, is 1.5 miles according to Google Maps. That is 7,920 feet (5,280 feet per mile x 1.5). So if participants had been standing snugly, shoulder-to-shoulder, on both sides of the street, there would have been 7,920 people at the protest, well below the count that the tea party estimated, even in its sticker count.
The tea party protesters in Albuquerque did their best to stand side-by-side for an obvious reason; to be seen by those driving by on Menaul. There were very few areas, if any, that were two-people deep on the sidewalk, even on the south side of Menaul between San Pedro and Louisiana where the bulk of the protesters were located.
And even then, it was not shoulder-to-shoulder along the entire route 1.5 mile route.
There were a large number of areas few people. The one area that I can recall having the largest concentration of people was on the southeast corner of San Pedro and Menaul and in areas shaded by trees alongside Menaul by Coronado Mall.
While I was reporting on the event (where I interviewed 75 people), I walked from one end (San Pedro) to nearly the other end (Wyoming) and back to Louisiana (I parked in the Coronado parking lot, which was not close to being full) between 5 p.m. and 6:15 p.m. When I left the tea party, I made sure to drive west through the entire route; there were not people side-by-side through the entire route at 6:15 when I left.
“We saw a huge swell of people arriving between 5:30 and 6:00 as people got off work,” Albuquerque Tea Party board member Tina Carson said in a statement. I thought that would happen; that’s why I waited until after 6:00 to leave.
So, being generous, let’s assume that there were enough people to line the street along Menaul to San Pedro to Wyoming. That would be 3,960 very uncomfortable people next to each other on a warm, sunny spring day.
But that distance excludes any intersections or entrances to businesses along the busy road. No protesters stood in those areas—probably because they didn’t want to block traffic or risk getting run over. There are two major roads (Louisiana and Pennsylvania) along that route. There are ten minor roads (for example, Georgia Street and Hoffman Road) that cross Menaul. There are also more than 25 entrances to businesses on the southern side of Menaul. Let’s say between all of those, that cuts out a quarter of a mile (very reasonable).
That leaves 6,600 feet; or, as I noted earlier, a maximum of 3,300 people on one side of the road, if packed cheek by jowl.
That is pretty much the maximum amount of people that could have possibly been at the tea party protest; and even then, it would be very generous. An estimate of 2,000 to 3,000 would not only be fair, but probably generous.
But it is difficult to calculate an exact crowd size without a wide view of the entire protest area.
