How many people showed up at the turun Anwar rally? We count one by one.

So, pretty sure you’ve heard of Himpunan Turun Anwar, right…? Or no? Anyway that was what happened recently. Basically, a looooot of people marched from Central Market to Merdeka Square last Saturday, wearing all black, demanding that Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim step down as Malaysia’s Prime Minister.

But how many people went, exactly? Well, Astro Awani estimated about 10,000 to 15,000 people participated. Meanwhile, Free Malaysia Today says about 18,000 people attended. On the other hand, Malaysiakini stated 25,000 people.

Uhm, so which one of them is right? To find out…

We tried counting one by one… but found an easier way instead

At first, we tried looking at the photos of the crowds and seeing if we could count them one by one from the picture.

But after getting a migraine, we discovered a way to estimate how many people attended an event called ‘The Jacobs Method’. The principle behind it is basically: area x density. The density is calculated based on how much space a person takes up in a crowd, and for this, there are three different types of crowd densities.

1. Light crowd – 0.93 square meter/person
2. Dense but manageable crowd – 0.42 square meter/person
3. Mosh-pit density crowd – 0.23 square meter/person

There weren’t a lot of aerial photos of the event floating around the internet, but we managed to find footage from Astro Awani showing a nice shot of the crowd gathering in front of the Sultan Abdul Samad building at around 2.50 pm.

@501awani

Dataran Merdeka dibanjiri puluhan ribu peserta Himpunan Merayakan Demokrasi: Turun Anwar yang tiba dengan berarak dari Masjid Negara. Peserta mula memenuhi kawasan dataran sekitar jam 2.50 petang, dengan suasana semakin gamat apabila mereka melaungkan slogan mendesak beberapa isu berbangkit diselesaikan segera. #AWANInews

♬ original sound – Astro AWANI – Astro AWANI

From the video, it seems like the crowd is mostly a dense but manageable crowd, so all we had to do was map out the area where the crowd was seen in the video…

…calculate the area using an area calculator, then divide it by the crowd density to get a rough estimate of how many people showed up. With that in mind,

• Total area: 10558.713m²
• Crowd density:  0.42 m² per person
• Jalan kerja: 10558/0.42 = 25,138.095

= 25,138 people!

So we guess MalaysiaKini’s estimates would be the closest one. With that being said…

Did the organizers fall very short of the target?

According to earlier reports, Perikatan Nasional (PN), who organized the event, estimated some 300,000 people to show up.

“They (the supporters) want to show up more than what we announced, so we calculated, even among our party alone are already 100,000 (people). So we estimate, with PN component parties, the public, stakeholders, influential individuals, attendance will reach around 300,000 on the day,”

– Afnan Hamimi Taib Azamudden, PN Youth Chief/PAS Youth Chief, translated from FMT.

Based on our calculations though, only about 25,000 people showed up, which is only around 8% of the projected target. Bear in mind though, our calculations aren’t perfect: it was based on a single video at one point of the day, and even then only one area of the event was captured. 

To compare it with our previous article on calculating BERSIH attendees, there are significantly less available aerial pictures of the event, so this calculation might not paint the full picture. For all we know, the number of attendees might have increased later towards the evening, but the rain makes that unlikely.

Did you agree with our calculations? Let us know!