How the Ministry of Internal Affairs underestimates the turnout for rallies - in one graph

At least from the “swamp protests”, the Ministry of Internal Affairs publishes underestimated assessments of visits to the opposition rallies.

At the rally “We will regain the right to elections” on August 2, officials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that 1,500 people took part in the action. According to their numbers, only 600 people were detained for promotions, and according to the ATS-Info -1001. If you believe the information of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, it will turn out that the promotions were detained at least every third, or even two-thirds of the audience-a statement with which most participants and witnesses of the rally will not agree.

Alternative assessment backed up by facts is only in Moscow - in this city, since 2013, visitors to rallies are considered by the White Meter’s volunteer initiative.

How does the White counter work?

Activists record the number of people passing on the rally through the scope of the metal detector. One visitor to the rally is one pressing on a mechanical counter-clicier in the hands of a volunteer. One or two frames falls along the volunteer. Their data is recorded every half an hour.

This approach also has disadvantages. “White counter” can only be considered coordinated promotions: the police overlap the passages randomly for protests without sanction. There are no fixed passages there either - it means that there is nowhere to arrange volunteers.

The white meter volunteer coordinator Dmitry Nesterov told the OVD-info that the error with this calculation method is not more than 8%. With a dry counting of people at the rally this Saturday, the volunteers got a figure of 49.9 thousand people, but the real figure, says Nesterov, a little more - up to 60 thousand people. The quality of the assessment was affected by the fact that the police opened an additional passage.

If we compare the calculations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the “White Counter”, it turns out that the department underestimates the appearance on rallies - on average about 60%. And this is if you take dry indicators of volunteer meters. In reality, rallies can be a little more than people.

According to the results of the rallies, the White Meter publishes in the public domain reports with its methodology and scans of accounting sheets, in which the project coordinators record numbers from volunteers clickers.

And what does the Ministry of Internal Affairs think?

The methodology of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, on the contrary, closed. No one knows for sure how the police consider the appearance to rallies.

Perhaps the police set special sensors on metal detectors, which record the number of people who have passed through the framework. In any case, this was said in 2012 to RIA Novosti reporters in the press service of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow. Such sensors are sometimes installed in stores and shopping centers to count customers. Now it is also attached to the frames at rallies at rallies, but it is not known whether they are needed to calculate the flow of people or something else.

In 2012, an unnamed employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ministry of Internal Affairs told the journalist RIA that the police did not trust the data of the sensors due to the behavior of the protesters: “The sensors record only incoming, so if a person went out and went several times, they will count it as not one, two, three or more participants. Often, the rally participants deliberately use this opportunity that the organizers can report for a large number. ”

In the same interview with RIA Novosti, the representative of the press service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs said that the police are calculating the average density of the participants in the rally area from photographs from the crowd and from the air and resort to the help of experts.

Such estimates can make both experts and algorithms, but both are mistaken. For example, during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. When on February 2, one of the largest mass protests was held on Tahrir Square in Cairo, expert estimates were from tens of thousands to several million.

Professor Clark McFaile-one of the main experts of sociologists on the calculation and management of the crowd-at the request of the English magazine Wired considered how many people were on the square that day with the help of Google Earth satellite photographs. But even his assessment was approximate - from 200 thousand to a million people.

Does anyone else consider protests?

According to Dmitry Nesterov, people from other departments were also considered to be the participants in the shares - and they did it manually.

“Some rallies on Moscow topics came to consider taciturn men“ from the city hall ”. Also, at large liberal rallies, sometimes several guys of a sports look stood, who could say that they were from the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the FSB. But they hardly considered conscientiously, because they considered the selective framework, and then periodically distracting. In general, it was more like profanity, ”says Nesterov.

He assumes that departments do not trust each other that someone needs operational data with an approximate assessment.

Does the Ministry of Internal Affairs believe in its numbers?

The figures voiced by the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs are uncontestially used in the Prochremlevsky media-for example, in the final issues of "Vesti" and in anti-liberal telegram channels .

Whether the Ministry of Internal Affairs has any other figures, except for those published by their press service , is not known for certain. However, Nesterov says that the reports transmitted inside the department indicate higher estimates of the number of protesters.

There are other evidence in favor of this thesis. So, in 2015, on the march of Boris Nemtsov’s memory, the police officially counted about 21 thousand participants, and the insider editor -in -chief of “Echo of Moscow” Alexei Venediktov allegedly said that there were up to 56 thousand people on the march. This number converges with the calculations of the “white counter” - on that day, clickers of volunteers recorded 51.6 thousand people.