Zennie Abraham, a blogger at Veterans Today, has lived in Oakland since 1974 and believes that the crowd estimate of the Occupy Oakland General Strike provided by Oakland police is way off. Abraham claims the crowd was much closer to 100,000 than the official count of 7000.

You can’t take a snapshot of an event like this, because of its time length; you have to think of it as a dynamic. In any population there are births, deaths, in-migration, and out-migration. For the Occupy Oakland General Strike, there were no births, thankfully no deaths, but a lot of in-migration and out-migration.

What was so amazing about the size of the crowd both inside the plaza and just outside of it, then marching to the Port of Oakland, was that it did not decrease in size; it increased. And that was with some people leaving it, and others coming in from BART and from around Oakland via foot or other parts of the Bay by car.

For that to happen all day long and considering the capacity of the plaza and the crowds outside of it points to 100,000 people. I’ve never seen anything like that in the entire history of this city.

And that is why it must be said that much of the media should be drawn and quartered for the most irresponsible coverage I’ve ever seen. Many outlets just waited for something bad to happen, or looked for it. But there were so many people more having a great time, that whatever happened was far away from downtown Oakland.

The Whole Foods Oakland Facility is on 27th and Harrison and outside of downtown Oakland, and a good mile away from City Hall Plaza. But to the media eye, the vandalism that happened there made headlines. Let’s just get this out of the way: it should not have happened, but that’s no excuse to get the whole story wrong.

The video below is all the proof anyone would need that the official numbers were way, way off, but 100,000? Oakland’s population is around 300,000, even accounting for the folks who came in from the rest of the Bay area (population 4.5 million) to march, that’s still probably too high a number to be realistic. Still, I’m willing to go along with a tally that’s several times higher than what the Oakland police—and the mainstream media—told us.

What’s important to remember as you watch the size of these marching masses, is that less than two months have passed since Occupy Wall Street began. It’s only going to get more interesting from here on out.
 

 
Above, a bird’s eye view of a static crowd of 90,000 people at the Rose Bowl posted by redditter BdotTS.
 

 
Via reddit

Not that it’s directly relevant, but here in NYC Fox has kicked the anti-OWS rhetoric up a tiny bit. The story is now that, although there’s a “minority of true believers with good intentions”, they’re getting swallowed up by homeless people and actual criminals, attracted to the free food. This morning they had a story on sexual assaults at OWS in NYC.

In other words, they don’t dare impugn the main rason d’etre, but they’re eating away at the edges in order to cast the entire thing in a bad light.

No doubt media outlets in the other cities will have their own little strategies (like underestimating crowd sizes) in order to discredit OWS. I guess the key is for OWS to continue to get its message straight to the people through their own internet-centric media sources rather than rely on TV.

I was there in a stationary place near downtown while the march on the Port commenced (I didn’t march on the Port - I had no reason to see it shut down). My conservative estimate was closer to 20-25,000, which is why I was really surprised when they said 7,000. It seemed ALOT larger than that, but I don’t know anything about crowd estimation science.

Em:
They’re essentially doing the same thing here in Portland, with respect to media coverage: drawing a correlation between drug addicts, transient community and the Occupy movement.
It’s easy to do, too, as where Occupy Portland is located is near Portland’s downtown transit mall, light rail lines and a large homeless shelter project. And on any given day, if you wander through it, the visible minority appears to be - unfortunately - the sort of homeless transit strip gladiator types, crazed crackheads and some thrill-seeking urban rat kids.
So, unless someone spends some time down there or knows at least how these ad hoc things occur, the people that are actually doing things are obscured from view because they’re actually doing things (running the camp, cooking food, setting up communication, etc.).
Add to that that there’s also some reticence to simply kick the homeless members of Portland out of the camp and the difficulty of identifying problem behaviors, OWS Portland has it’s work cut out for it.
So, our local media’s been having a field day with all of it.

2 million people marched in london in 2003 yet blair followed the bush and invaded iraq

100,000 huh?

Man I love the smell of propaganda in the morning…

In the Bay Area the media have started with the ‘rape allegations’ and ‘business is leaving Oakland because of Occupy’ rhetoric.

Both stories are problems with the city and economy itself, not OWS Oakland. Downtown Oakland is more vibrant and safer now then prior to Occupy.

Bad elements are still there, as they always have been, but the sheer amount of good and decent people now attending GA’s and checking it out is nothing but an improvement.