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John Hollenhorst ReportingYesterday's rally was startling because it was the biggest crowd anyone could remember for a Utah political demonstration. But just how big was it?
Maybe we should just say, "it was really, really big", and leave it at that. Estimates yesterday ranged from a few thousand to several tens of thousands. Getting a more specific answer turned out to be real challenge.
From Chopper Five, it was obvious that Sunday's event was not a typical political pow-wow. It was like a human Mississippi surging up State Street, a river of people a hundred feet wide and a half mile long.
We brainstormed with the Division of Wildlife, where they often count birds and elk and the like. Biological statistician Kent Hersey showed us some techniques for using measurements and arithmetic to find an approximate answer.
The basic idea is to divide crowd pictures into sections with roughly comparable crowd density. Then count the people in a few sections. If you can calculate the size of each section, you can then calculate the likely crowd size in that the half-mile river of humanity.
Kent Hersey , Biological Statistician: "Counting these people is going to be a tedious task. And there's no way to avoid that, unfortunately."
And that proved to be our undoing. The image quality was too fuzzy to count individuals. We struggled to distinguish people from their shadows, a couple in the crowd from an individual. With our method, it could have been anywhere from 20,000 to maybe 50,000.
It turns out that Salt Lake City Police went through the same exercise today and had the same frustration. They ended up saying the crowd was at least 25,000 but it could have been a lot higher. So we wind up where we started, saying, "it was a ...really... really... big crowd.
