D.C. crowd tallies likely never known
Park Service no longer counting heads
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump says his inauguration will have “an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout.” Organizers of a protest the next day call it the biggest demonstration in history to welcome a new president.
Exactly how many people show up for both events likely will never be known.
Counting the number of people at major public events is as much art as science, and there will be no official tally of how many people attend either Friday’s inaugural festivities or the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday.
For decades, the National Park Service provided official crowd estimates for gatherings on the National Mall. That changed after the Million Man March in 1995, a gathering of black men meant to show renewed commitment to family and solidarity. The Park Service estimated 400,000 people attended the march, making it one of the largest demonstrations in history in Washington.
But organizers believed they reached their goal of 1 million participants. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, one of the march organizers, threatened to sue the Park Service, arguing that its count was motivated by “racism, white supremacy and hatred for Louis Farrakhan.” Researchers at Boston University did an independent analysis and said the crowd was much bigger, pegging it at more than 800,000.
No lawsuit was filed, but the dispute was enough to get the Park Service out of the head-counting business. The next year, Congress passed an appropriations bill that barred the agency from spending money to count crowds. While that language didn’t appear in subsequent budgets, refusing to count crowds became Park Service policy.
The agency still estimates crowd size for its own planning purposes but does not publicly reveal the figures.
Before it stopped, the Park Service came up with its crowd figures by studying aerial photographs. Using a grid system, the Park Service would divide the Mall into sections of equal square footage. Then it counted the number of people in each section of the grid by looking at how tightly packed the crowd was and assigning a number of people per square foot.
Christopher Geldart, the District of Columbia’s homeland security director, has said consistently that he expects between 800,000 and 900,000 people to attend Trump’s inauguration. He said he would use
Organizers of Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington have received a permit from D.C. police for a gathering of 200,000 people.
the tried-and-true grid method to provide his own crowd estimate on the Monday after the swearing-in.
According to Park Service figures, an anti-Vietnam War protest in 1969 drew 600,000 people to Washington. The Mall can easily accommodate crowds in the hundreds of thousands; between 300,000 and 400,000 regularly attend the July Fourth fireworks.
Organizers of Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington have received a permit from D.C. police for a gathering of 200,000 people. Geldart said he expects the number of participants to exceed that figure, based on data including bus, hotel and train bookings. He cautioned, however, that organizers have not yet told authorities to expect more than the permitted total.
The Park Service did not dispute a widely reported estimate that 1.8 million people went to Washington for President Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, believed to be the largest inaugural crowd in history. The biggest crowd the park Park Service counted at an inauguration was 1.2 million for Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 swearing-in.