Thousands of young people -supported by the rebels and various left-wing personalities- marched this Saturday in Paris against the pension reform project that the Government wants. More precisely, there were 150,000 to go down from the Place de la Bastille to the Place de la Nation, according to youth organizations and France insoumise. Uh no, 12,000 according to a police source on BFMTV. More like 14,045, finally says Occurrence, an independent firm that counted the protesters for a media group, including BFMTV.
This “march for our pensions” has resulted, in effect, in the same highly contrasted arithmetic table that usually closes the demonstrations: depending on whether we listen to the organizers, the police or an external observer, the orders of magnitude of the mobilization multiply or they contract. dramatically. It must be said that the methodologies used differ greatly from one actor to another. The Check’ from BFMTV reviewed them this Saturday.
• Occurrence of Cabinet: height, algorithm and videos
It is, therefore, the source now favored by the media that resort to its services from time to time to identify the walkers in a procession: the research and consulting firm Occurencia. Assaël Adary, co-founder and president, explained the know-how implemented by his company at BFMTV. Know-how based on technology: “It is a sensor that is a counting system, which creates a field as a finish line and everyone who crosses it is counted. It’s AI (artificial intelligence, Editor’s Note), an algorithm. It’s image analysis. “
He detailed its origin: “It is a technology that comes to us due to a basic need for security. These technologies are in museums, airports, stores”. “So we didn’t invent them, we just used them in a somewhat deviant 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 a position eight meters above the parade. In addition to the technique described below, Occurrence asks its staff to also perform mini-counts. Finally, Occurrence performs a count from the video recordings.
• Cantilever, “counters” and review: the font scheme
Traditionally, police figures are particularly expected. However, this Saturday he did not deliver any official statistics. “The march for our pensions”, although carried out at the request of youth organizations, was declared in the prefecture by La France insoumise, and the Paris police prefecture has the habit of not quantifying demonstrations of a political nature. However, a police source estimated the crowd for the day at “12,000 people”. An estimate that results from a canonical schema.
First, the police stationed the agents flying over the demonstration, in one or two places depending on their importance. The first is located a few hundred meters downstream from your starting point. The second is halfway. The teams assigned to this job then estimate the number of protesters per line, calculating based on the width of the roadway. To help them in their task, they have an accessory, a counter, which they activate manually.
After 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 tell everything once again by referring to the video recordings.
• Relatively close balances between the police and Occurrence
High position, access to recordings: these points in common between the methodology of the police and that of the Occurrence cabinet may 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 point out that during a Parisian demonstration held on April 19, 2018 in Paris, the police had estimated 11,500 protesters and 15,300 incidents. On December 17, 2019, Occurrence mentioned 72,500 people and the police 76,000. The guilds 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 bombed 150,000 people.
• Chartered trains and buses, people counting: the organizers’ method
This upward deviation remains a matter of method. If the mobilization of young people against the pension reform project this Saturday was not due to the unions but to the youth organizations, with the support of the rebellious France, it is still necessary to investigate the union practices in the matter.
First, the unions record the number of trains and buses reserved by the participants to reach the demonstration. Then, they stagger “counters” at different points of passage of the procession: by “counters”, this time we must understand the activists who notice the succession of walkers, line by line again. It is then up to the unions to compile their assessments, collate 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 give just one example, this Saturday, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a figure from rebellious France, sharply denounced the copy made by Occurrence, calling into question the reality of its independence.
“The macronist manipulative agency ‘occurrence’ ridiculed by all the specialists, after taking the wrong street, we would be 14,045 parading on January 21. But no joke! We were 3.5! As many as you to count, “he tweeted. .
A few years before this row, in 2015, a report from the Reflection Commission on the measurement of the number of participants in street demonstrations had tried to arbitrate the match between social agents and the police. “The only possible method is, as the police prefecture does, to observe the entire demonstration”, we could read in particular.
Unless… unless it happens that under the pressure of the crowd, the demonstration takes a form that blurs the reference points. Thus, on Thursday, the unions, rejecting the police claim that only 80,000 people had marched in Paris against their own outlook of 400,000 individuals, stressed that the crowds had caused the march to split into two routes. A second route that effectively altered the deal to the point that Occurrence preferred to refrain from posting a result.
Source: BFM TV
