Paris Cops Slam Hate March Figures

The Paris police are pissed at claims that they are biased against Manif Pour Tous for refuting their 1.4 million attendance figure at Sunday's anti-gay march. Yesterday the police issued a press release.

The estimation of the number of demonstrators at the “Manif Pour Tous”, held Sunday, March 24, has seen a series of claims challenging Police Prefecture neutrality. These allegations are inacceptable and the Police Prefecture wishes to reply on two scores. Firstly, late Sunday afternoon, the police prefecture provided its initial estimate based on data collected by officers on the ground and by information collected with video and aerial photography The following day, the accurate recount was begun by examining video footage which confirmed the initial evaluation communicated by the Police Prefecture of 300,000 demonstrators. 

Noting that they have used the same methodology to estimate crowd sizes for years, the police press release goes on to offer to provide the media with all of their data. Some anti-gay US groups this week further inflated the Paris march figure to 1.7M.  At Tuesday's rally in Washington DC, NOM head Brian Brown again cited the 1.4M number. (Via JMG reader David in Paris)