Demo against right-wing extremism
Many more participants in Hamburg than expected – how did the big errors in counting come about?
It is unclear how many thousand people in Hamburg demonstrated against right-wing extremism on Friday.
© Stephan Wallocha / Picture Alliance
The Hamburg police counted 50,000 people at the first large demonstration against the right on January 19th. The interior authorities have now corrected the number to 180,000. How do you make such big mistakes when counting?
Were there 50,000 or 180,000 people who gathered on the Jungfernstieg in Hamburg on January 19th to demonstrate against right-wing extremism and the AfD? The images of the rally that followed the revelations by the research medium “Correctiv” were impressive. However, the large discrepancy between the number of participants was already irritating back then.
The Hamburg police counted 50,000 participants at the time. Given the crowded streets and subways around Jungfernstieg, this seemed unrealistic to the organizers and many participants. They assumed there were 130,000 protesters. It is now clear that there must have been more people on the Jungfernstieg.
Due to public interest and the urging of SPD politician Kazim Abaci, the interior authority took another measurement using aerial photos. She now officially speaks of 180,000 participants. A big difference from the first official figures. The question seems all the more important: How do you actually measure so many people in a relatively small area?
Participation numbers are based on estimates of total area
There are different methods for this. At smaller demonstrations, it actually happens that counting is done by hand at the various entrances. When a demo train starts moving, the row counting method is primarily used. In this, the rows of people passing by are multiplied by an estimate of the number of people in each row.
However, if a lot of people gather in a certain place, such as on the weekend in front of the Bundestag in Berlin or on the Jungfernstieg in Hamburg, you have to use an estimate of the total area. To arrive at the total number of participants, the number of square meters is multiplied by the density value. According to the calculations of the late American journalist Herbert Jacobs, in a loose arrangement with an arm’s length distance between these people, this is approximately 1. In a dense crowd, such as at a festival, there would be four people per square meter.
For example, if an area is 60,000 square meters, as in the demo on Jungfernstieg, one can assume that there are around 180,000 people with an estimated density of around 3 people per square meter. The sociologist Stephan Poppe from the University of Leipzig is leaving in an interview with Deutschlandfunk from 2020 assumes that the measurement error with this method is around 20 to 30 percent. If more people demonstrate, the measurement error taken into account also increases.
Demo numbers are political
A relative magnitude can therefore be determined with relative certainty. And yet the media in particular have to be careful with the reported figures. In most cases, the participants are counted by the police and organizers. Protest researchers like Poppe consider these numbers to be unreliable. The organizers in particular have an intention to make the numbers higher. The more people there are at a demonstration, the more determined and emphatic the protest signal ultimately appears.
However, there is also a ray of hope in the inaccuracy. In the future, neither gut feeling nor area estimates will provide information about participant numbers, but rather software programs. Video footage from drones could capture accumulations more accurately. To date, this technical process has not yet been used across the board in Germany, explains Poppe Interview with Bavarian Radio. However, he predicts that this could well be the case in ten years.
Sources:Deutschlandfunk, Bavarian radio, NDR