Youth organizations marched in Paris this Saturday to protest against the government’s plan to reform pensions. When estimating the number of participants, there was a great contrast between the figures given according to their origin. BFMTV.com takes stock of the different methods used.
Thousands of young people – supported by the rebellious and various left-wing personalities – marched against the pension reform project wanted by the government this Saturday in Paris. More precisely, they were 150,000 to go down from Place de la Bastille to Place de la Nation, according to youth organizations and France insoumise. Uh no, 12,000 according to a police source at BFMTV. Rather 14,045, finally assures Occurrence, an independent firm which counted the demonstrators for a media collective, including BFMTV.
This “march for our pensions” has indeed resulted in the same very contrasting arithmetic table which usually closes the demonstrations: depending on whether we listen to the organizers, the police or an outside observer, the orders of magnitude of the mobilization multiply, or contract dramatically. It must be said that the methodologies used differ widely from one actor to another.
• Cabinet Occurrence: height, algorithm and videos
It is therefore the source now favored by the media calling on its services from time to time to identify the walkers of a procession: the research and consulting firm Occurrence. Assaël Adary, who is the co-founder and president, explained the principle implemented by his company on BFMTV.
Know-how based on technology: “It’s a sensor which is a counting system, which creates a field like a finish line and everyone who crosses it is counted. It’s IA (artificial intelligence, Editor’s note), an algorithm. It’s image analysis.”
He detailed its origin: “It is a technology that comes to us from a basic security need. These technologies are in place in museums, airports, stores.” “So we didn’t invent them, we just use them in a somewhat diverted use, outside, from a high floor to cover a street or a boulevard,” he added.
This question of height is crucial. More specifically, the Occurrence teams ideally take up a position eight meters above the parade. In addition to the technique described below, Occurrence asks its staff to carry out mini-counts in addition. Finally, Occurrence carries out a recount based on the video recordings.
• Overhang, “counters” and reviewing: the font scheme
Traditionally, police figures are particularly expected. However, this Saturday, it did not deliver any official statistics. “The march for our pensions”, although carried out at the call of youth organizations, was declared in the prefecture by La France insoumise, and the Paris police prefecture has a habit of not quantifying demonstrations of a political nature. A police source, however, estimated the crowd of the day at “12,000 people”. An estimate that results from a canonical schema.
First, the police positioned agents overhanging the demonstration, in one or two places depending on its importance. The first is located a few hundred meters downstream from its starting point. The second is located halfway. The teams assigned to this work then estimate the number of demonstrators per line, calculating according to the width of the roadway. To help them in their task, they have an accessory, a counter, which they operate manually.
Once the event is over, the police compare their numbers. In order to overcome the margin of error, these are increased by 10%. Above all, the police then recount the whole thing once more by consulting the video recordings.
• Relatively close balance sheets between the police and Occurrence
Raised position, access to recordings: these commonalities between the methodology of the police and that of the cabinet Occurrence can explain the proximity of their balance sheets.
In addition to this Saturday – where a source from the first counted 12,000 people, and the second 14,045 – we can thus note that during a Parisian demonstration held on April 19, 2018 in Paris, the police had estimated 11,500 demonstrators, and Occurrence 15,300 . On December 17, 2019, Occurrence mentioned 72,500 people, and the police 76,000. The unions saw things differently at the same time, with respective estimates of 50,000 and 350,000 walkers according to the CGT. And remember that this Saturday, the organizers shelled 150,000 people.
• Chartered trains and buses, head count: the organizers’ method
This upward deviation is still a question of method. If the mobilization of young people against this Saturday’s pension reform project was not due to the unions but to youth organizations, with the support of rebellious France, it is still necessary to look into union practices. in the matter.
First, the unions register the number of trains and buses reserved by the participants to get to the demonstration. Then, they stagger “counters” at different crossing points of the procession: by “counters”, this time we must understand activists who note the succession of walkers, line by line again. It is then up to the unions to compile their assessments, to cross-check them before producing the estimates that they will communicate to the media in the process.
• Figures still questionable
It goes without saying that these gaps between the data delivered by one and the other are the subject of disputes, sometimes fierce. To take just one example, this Saturday, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a figure of rebellious France, curtly denounced the copy made by Occurrence, calling into question the reality of its independence.
“The macronist manipulative agency “occurence” ridiculed by all the specialists, after taking the wrong street, there would be 14,045 of us parading on January 21. But no jokes! We were 3.5!! As many as you to count” , he tweeted.
A few years before this quarrel, in 2015, a report of the Commission of reflection on the measurement of the number of participants in street demonstrations had claimed to referee the match between social partners and police. “The only possible method is, as the police prefecture does, to watch the whole of the demonstration”, could we read in particular.
Except that… except that it happens that under the pressure of the crowd, the demonstration adopts a form that blurs the benchmarks. Thus, on Thursday, the unions, rejecting the police assertion that only 80,000 people had marched in Paris against their own panorama of 400,000 individuals, stressed that the crowds had led to the procession being separated into two routes. A second route which effectively upset the deal to the point that Occurrence preferred to refrain from publishing a result.
