Crowd Counts Are a Game Nobody Wins

Numbers don't lie, right?

But the problem is, there are lots of numbers out there when it comes to counting crowds at Washington demonstrations. And finding the person who isn't lying about the numbers is a perennial sport when it comes to protest politics in the nation's capital.

The organizers of a demonstration exaggerate, sometimes by the hundred thousand. The opposition dismisses the crowd, slicing it by at least a half.

Police, if they talk crowd size at all, are all over the place. And federal agencies have learned to stay far, far away from the game.

I've spent a decade covering many of these events. After every story about a protest, march or demonstration, the paper received a flood of nasty mail excoriating us for the crowd estimate. Too small, shouted organizers. Too large, shouted opponents.

The latest controversy comes after the "Tea Party gathering" Sept. 12 to protest President Obama's policies. Organizers have been challenging the crowd counts by law enforcement and mainstream media -- about 60,000 to 70,000 -- with their own estimates of up to a million.

The National Park Service has been the target of much ire because of this disparity, steadfastly refusing to offer its guess. "In 1995, we were ordered by Congress not to give crowd estimates," said Bill Line, the affable and earnest spokesman for most of the region's parks and historic monuments.

That order came after organizers of the Million Man March nearly sued the Park Service because authorities said that about 400,000 men came to D.C. that day, not the advertised million.

The stewards of our parks were elated to get out of the counting business. The counting they now do is before an event, for such mundane matters as portable toilet placement and traffic cone patterns.

The folks who applied to gather at Freedom Plaza and march to the Capitol on Sept. 12 said on their form that "they expected 5,000 people," Line said. So that's what the Park Service prepared for.

Clearly, the crowd was much larger.

Brendan Steinhauser, who helped organize the event for FreedomWorks, said he looked at photos of the event, compared them with photos of the inauguration and other sizable demonstrations, accounted for the people who were coming by bus and by Metro, and came up with an estimate of 600,000.