Occupy Oakland March 100,000?

Initial reports of Occupy Oakland’s General Strike March last week had the number of protesters at 3,000-10,000, max. I rolled with that number in my reporting the day of the event, not knowing any better, as many people did. But where did the number come from? Oakland’s Interim Police Chief Howard Jordan (7,000) and some mainstream media agencies that weren’t even there.

Now, as mentioned in this video above by the Young Turks, it was clearly much bigger than Jordan estimated. And the video below has some pretty good footage:

The San Francisco Chronicle says the actual number was closer to 100,000. Here’s more:

This blogger has been in Oakland since 1974. The largest crowd at Frank Ogama Plaza was for a speech by then-Senator, now President Barack Obama in 2007, and for which was estimated at 18,000. Barack filled the space with people.

The Occupy Oakland General Strike had that many people in the plaza for most of the day, while two huge crowds were outside of it: one marching down Broadway, the other a set of people walking around various parts of downtown Oakland with protest signs.

Hmm. Sounds like’more than 7,000, eh?

Others (i.e. Occupy Oakland) have reported 20,000 or so. Maybe at peak it was 20,000, but as the blogger above was apt to point out, the total number of people coming and going throughout the day was more than the number ta peak (simple logic).

How many people participated? Who knows? But it was certainly much more than the 3,000-10,000 widely reported.