Last weekend there were large numbers of protestor’s in London at the “Unite the Kingdom” rally. Stephen Yaxley Lennon (Tommy Robinson) has said
“This is the biggest demonstration in Britain’s history, 3 million strong.”
I keep seeing these claims that there were 3 million people at the Unite the march, and whenever people refute them, a host of accounts chime in with the accusation “LEFTIST”. This is frustrating, because it is a relatively easy claim to verify, yet people keep having interminable debates over it, putting hours of time into argument rather than putting in the tiny amount of effort it would require to verify those claims.
I decided to model the behaviour I want to see by estimating the number.
The march in London was planned from Approximately Blackfriars / Stamford Street through to Whitehall / Trafalgar Square. Honestly, I don’t have a snapshot of an EXACT moment where I can validate the start and end point of the rally, however looking at videos on line I found a few videos which I can situate on the map which UTK supporters claim in their own words are representative of the scale.
The aerial footage I will be using for my estimates comes from this clip. I take it as sufficient evidence that this is representative footage that I can’t find a single comment complaining about this being propaganda aimed at under-representing the scale of the march, but do see many comments opining that anyone can see, from looking at this clip, that there are very obviously millions of people there.
According to pro-UTK commenter’s this video quite clearly demonstrates AT LEAST 3 million people and how the mainstream media are lying.
In order to try to estimate the number of people in the video clip, I took screenshots at each point that the helicopter recorded and stitched them together with slight adjustments for scale (using building alignment and road width). This method is not perfect, and I am also making the assumption that the video starts and ends at the beginning and end of the march.
This resultant image can be seen to fit on the map of the march route as follows.
This is the segment of London where the march was when this aerial footage was recorded
This is my collage superimposed over that segment of the map
So, you can see that I’m not doing something super dodgy, this collage pretty much fits the location on the map and matches the buildings in those locations from satellite imagery.
The first way Im going to try and estimate involves using sample squares to try to get an average person count for placing any random sample square on the march.
As you can see, the density of people varies in each square, read left to right these sample squares contain 14, 6 and 22 people. In order to be maximally charitable Im going to assume a round and high number of 20 people per square, which will absolutely be an overestimate when multiplied through.
Not being happy with this, I came back and tried to analyse a couple of spots to see if this was an underestimate, and cross referenced my count with lots and lots of replaying of the video where it’s easier to see people than in a static image due to their swaying movement.
This led to the following counts, leading me to up my “average persons per sample square” to 20-28 people (better to overestimate than underestimate).
This also puts my sample squares ( ~6.25 meters squared each, verified using ruler tool on Google MyMaps) toward the higher density when it comes to crowd estimation where
Loose crowd: 1 person per square meter.
Solid crowd: 2 people per square meter => 12.5 person / 6.25m^2
Packed crowd: 3 people per square meter => 18.75 person / 6.25 m^2
Mosh pit/unstable crowd: 4+ people per square meter => 25+ person / 6.25 m^2
I then cover the entire crowd in sample squares and count the number of these squares, multiplying that number by the average square sample size to get an estimate of the crowd.
So, that gives an estimate for the crowd in that aerial footage in the range 13120 to 18368 people in the entire video. Over two million nine hundred and eighty one thousand people less than some people had an intuition for eyeballing the clip.
I’ve also seen some people claim that the aerial footage didn’t cover the whole crowd which extended over Blackfriars bridge. So, we can model that case and be as charitable as possible.
We still get nowhere near 3 million with a high end estimate being 55104.
Finally, to cross reference this I thought I would simply try calculating by area.
This gave me the following
So, at ABSOLUTE most 128,000 within that area AND over half a kilometre of areas not recorded by the aerial footage.
From what I’ve seen then, I’m most comfortable saying that the crowd size was probably about 50,000 (and I do think even that might be generous).
The met police have estimated1 approximately 110,000-150,000 attended the protests over the weekend. I don’t know their methods and assume they are superior to my own, so I can’t see any reason to doubt that number. Though maybe their number is an overestimate, or an estimate based on the total across the whole of London at all times, not necessarily reflecting the number involved in the rally directly at any given time.
The claim that there were over 3 million PROUD BRITONS at Tommy’s rally is another piece of disinformation meant to divide us. A falsehood being lazily repeated by ideologically captured Tommy supporters unfortunately incapable of questioning their beliefs. People who care about truth should reject this.
Two lessons from this:
Humans are really bad at guessing the number of items in collections over about ten. We just don’t have good “intuitions” for thousands of items at once.
We can see how it’s really easy for rumours to spread and for people to completely believe extreme claims they haven’t verified and that we should be very careful with what we believe or promote, especially if it has great political consequences.
Small nitpick: you say it's 2986k less than 3 mil. Surely it's 2886k, right? Otherwise great work!
I don't understand the overlay technique, can you explain to me the numbers using a cookie monster analogy?