[logotype]

It is not an exaggeration. I was there, joining several protests including the CHRF 2M protest. In addition, the police estimates is always wrong (of course they want the numbers to be as low as possible). One example was a protest around Victoria Park. According to “official police figures” it was 180k attending - but they only counted the people in the limited Victoria Park square, it was completely PACKED. They didn’t count the hundreds of thousands of people outside the square who couldn’t fit in, they also didn’t count the people stuck in the MTR next to the park, who couldn’t even fit on the streets. The “official police statistics” is always off by a magnitude of x.

[woutr_be]

I was also there, but in my opinion 1.7M was an exaggeration. Don’t get me wrong, there were A LOT of people, the whole area from Victoria Park to Tamar Park was packed with people. There was also a constant flow of people coming in from North Point, a good 20 minute walk to the starting point.

Police estimates were definitely wrong, but the estimates from organisers are also always exaggerated, for the same reasons you mentioned the police estimates are wrong.