We Will Win NYC

Author: We Will Win

  • Say Their Names: Killed By ICE

    Rise And Resist organizes a weekly spoken vigil every Friday evening between 5:00 and 6:00 PM outside the subway station at 96th Street and Broadway here in New York City.

    Drawing on the BLM memorial tradition, the group publicly reads the names and stories of some of the people who were killed by ICE agents or died due to inhumane immigration enforcement during Trump’s second term in office.

    This vigil uses posters and written materials linked below.

    Photographic Posters

    The reading of the names are backed by photographs of the dead, drawn from Rise And Resist’s visually-powerful ICE Vigil posters (11×17 PDFs), which are also used in the group’s weekly silent vigil at Federal Plaza.

    Printable Documents for Spoken Vigil

    The documents below cover the same list of deaths as the posters, in several different formats.

    Scripts

    For those leading the reading, you can choose between these scripts depending on how much time you have.

    If the group repeats each of the names, or punctuates them with a bell, that adds about 10 minutes per reading.

    • For example, two complete readings of the full script, with call-and-response repetition and a chime between names, rotating between multiple readers, might take somewhere around 75 minutes.

    Handouts

    In a high-traffic location, volunteers may be able to distribute one or two flyers per minute; a handful of volunteers might distribute hundreds of fliers in an hour.

    Reference

    It can be useful to have a few printouts of the pronunciation guide for participants who’d like help with the names.

    Available for Use or Customization

    These documents were developed for use in our local vigil, but you’re also welcome to download and adapt them for use in your own work. The full collection is available in a Google Doc that you can copy and modify.

  • Meet Your Neighbors, September 18

    On Friday, we hosted a small neighborhood gathering to build community and share information about organizing for neighborhood defense and election protection.

    It was great to see so many folks talking and making connections across different branches of the fractal networks that bind our city together.

    Special thanks to Karin, Brenden, and Jamie for taking photos — I was too busy talking to people, and never took my phone out of my pocket until it was all over!

  • Creating Birds-Eye Views for Action Visualization

    When planning a rally, march, or other protest, it is helpful for everyone on the organizing team to be able to visualize the area and how people will flow through it over the course of the action: Where will the signs be raised? Where will the speakers be standing? How will the crowd move as they form up to march?

    One of the easiest answers is to screenshot a mapping app and then draw circles and arrows on top to illustrate the plan — and I do a lot of this — but we can take this a step further by using those same apps’ overhead photography models to generate a bird’s eye view.

    What Is A Bird’s Eye View?

    A so-called bird’s eye view is an image showing an overhead perspective, as if we were a bird (or drone) flying nearby and looking down at a scene at an angle. These were popularized in the 1800s, and combine aspects of a top-down map and an on-the-ground visual perspective.

    While I still love traditional maps, I think that this kind of bird’s eye view can make it easier for organizers and volunteers to visualize an area as a three-dimensional real place with less than effort than if they were looking at a map.

    Finding Viewpoint Images

    Google Maps is my go-to source for bird’s eye views, but Apple Maps, Bing Maps, and other tools all have similar capabilities, and for any specific location you might find that one or the other has more-attractive imagery, or has been updated more recently to include the latest changes in the area.

    Adding Lines, Shapes, and Labels

    I use a desktop illustration application to apply the markup, but an online tool such as Canva would also do the job — you can use any app you’re familiar with, as long as it lets you work in layers and treat the overlaid lines and shapes as objects that you can move around over time, which allows you to draft an image, share it with the team, then revise it as people provide feedback or the plan changes over time.

    You might also find it’s helpful to make copies of a view and then adjust them for different audiences — for example, you might have one version that focuses on where banners and signs should be arranged for use by the art & visuals team, and another version that focuses on street traffic and crowd flow for use by the marshal team. These could use separate underlying images, but often it’s sufficient to use the same perspective and just have different labels and arrows overlaid onto them.

    Examples

    Below are examples from three different actions I’ve helped to plan over the last year.

    Example: Foley Square

    For a recent protest outside Federal Plaza, I started with a Google Maps view of Foley Square, in “Satellite” mode, with overlaid labels turned off.

    I zoomed in, tilted the camera over at a 45° angle, and fiddled with the viewpoint for a while to ensure that the perspective included all of the parts of the scene we needed to consider — then I took a screenshot.

    To make it easier to see the items I drew on top of that view, I used the Mac’s built-in image tools to make the image paler: brighter and with less color.

    Then I used a few bright colors to highlight the areas for different activities, write in the street names and traffic directions, and note items we needed to set up or avoid.

    This same information could also be shown on a flat map, but I find that it’s not as evocative of the actual place:

    Example: Times Square

    A recent event took place in Times Square, and involved a team of hundreds of organizers and volunteers, along with thousands of participants, spread over more than 200,000 square feet.

    A bird’s eye view helps to show where key activities would take place, in a way that reminds people of what those places look like in real life, and helps to visualize the distances between each location.

    There was enough going on that it was helpful to have a separate view of the northern end of Times Square, sometimes known as Duffy Plaza.

    A third view highlighted the maneuvers required to stage up front banners and accompanying contingent in the hour before the march stepped off, then to get them to the front of the crowd at the right moment.

    Example: Park Avenue

    Sometimes a more-nearly-vertical perspective can help to show both streets and sidewalks in an area at similar levels of detail. This is akin to an overhead map, but less abstract — if you’ve been to this stretch of Park Avenue in midtown, seeing the buildings’ facades might help remind you of the experience.

  • Reference: Crowd Density

    Crowd density is the multiplier that relates participant turnout and square footage.

    It’s routine for organizers to overestimate crowd sizes. There’s no upside in publicly arguing about turnout, but it’s useful for the teams responsible for managing logistics to have a realistic understanding of the numbers involved.

    Finding Density Measurements

    It’s very difficult to find good crowd-density numbers for contemporary political events, so I’ve been attempting to gather data by finding overhead images of rallies and marches in NYC and manually counting heads, then dividing them by square footage values estimated based on local landmarks such as street widths and the locations of specific storefronts visible around the edge of the image.

    The numbers in this document reflect my analyses and shouldn’t be taken as authoritative — but I’m sharing them because they’re the best data I’ve been able to come up with.

    (If other folks have good overhead images of protest crowds here in New York that they’re willing to share, or have their own measurements of crowd density at similar mass events, please get in touch!)

    Rallies

    A busy rally or crowd waiting to begin marching is generally around five to ten square feet per person (or one to two people per square meter).

    The densest portions of a rally crowd can be as much as twice as crowded, perhaps three square feet per person (or three people per square meter), comparable to the front row of a concert — but this is not common, and generally only applies in a small area closest to the speaker’s podium or other center of attention. The outer edge of the crowd often trails off into a loose penumbra that is much less dense, and when you average those areas together, the overall density will rarely be much tighter than five square feet per person, and often less.

    Marches

    A protest march or informal parade is typically around ten to twenty square feet per person (or half to one person per square meter).

    A slow moving crowd will often be denser, while a march that is moving faster will be spread out more, or have gaps between clusters or contingents.

    Estimating Crowd Size By City Blocks

    For marches in Manhattan, you can take advantage of the standard size of city blocks:

    • A city block between numbered streets averages 264 feet (260 feet for standard side-streets, alternating with 300 feet for the occasional larger cross street) — when making quick estimates I round this off to 250 feet. (Some short blocks downtown can be 10–20% smaller; long blocks crosstown are between 2x and 4x a short block, typically around 3.5x.)
    • When marching in the street, traffic lanes are generally about 10 feet wide (varying between 10–12 feet, but I round down because people generally don’t fill the edges closest to the curb).
    • A traditional midtown avenue typically has four travel lanes, not counting parking lanes, although note that many avenues are now narrower than this, thanks to bike lanes and traffic-calming measures). Cross-town streets often have just one travel lane, but major cross streets often have four.

    Based on those numbers, you can make quick estimates as follows:

    • If the crowd is marching, it’s probably somewhere around ten square feet per person, which we can divide by a ten foot lane width to get about one marcher per linear foot per lane — yielding approximately 250 people per lane per short block, or around 1,000 people per block for a four-lane avenue.
    • If the crowd is stationary and packed in — for example, if folks are lining up behind the front banners in preparation for marching — the crowd could be as much as twice as dense, suggesting a maximum of 2,000 people per block for a four-lane avenue.

    Reference Scale

    March Examples

    • March 28, 2026 “No Kings 3” — A slow-moving march led by RAR marshals. 7.5 square feet per person in the area right behind the front banners, shifting to 9–10 further back.
    • A second view of No Kings 3 — in the middle of the march, around 10 square feet per person.
    • January 11, 2026 “No Wars, No Kings, No ICE” — around 10 square feet per person; slow-moving march led by RAR marshals.
    • February 28, 2026 “Iran Attack Rapid Response” — around 13 square feet per person; faster-moving march led by PSL.
    • January 23, 2026 “ICE Out For Good” — around 17 square feet per person; the central portions are around 12 ft2/p, but there are gaps between contingents and around the sides of the street, due in part to the need to maneuver around occasional parked cars and an active bike lane, and with the crowd still filling in after turning a corner from narrower street onto a wider avenue a few blocks earlier.

  • Reference: March Speeds

    When managing a march, marshals and organizers can spend a lot of time thinking about the speed at which the crowd will travel.

    The chart below shows a range of speeds in feet per minute, miles per hour, and minutes per block, using the average spacing for Manhattan numbered streets of 264 feet per block — 200 feet for buildings and 60 feet for most streets, periodically extended to 100 feet for larger streets every ten blocks or so, yielding twenty blocks per mile.

    Sample March Speeds

    Rise And Resist typically leads marches at deliberately-slow pace of roughly one mile per hour, or 80 to 100 feet per minute, or around three minutes per block.

    Organizations in the PSL orbit (TPF, PYM, ANSWER, et al) have a younger membership and typically march at around one and a half miles per hour, or around two minutes per block.

    All of these marching speeds are slower than the typical walking speed for an individual making a short trip around the city, like walking to the deli or hustling to the subway, although unsurprisingly those speeds vary greatly depending on age, ability, and urgency.

    Trained military units can march at higher speeds in close formation, but untrained crowds of mixed ages and abilities trying to match those speeds will tend to spread out and develop gaps and stragglers.

    Reference Scale

  • Tactic: Off-Site Comms

    Challenge:

    When coordinating a large team at an action via mobile text chat, there may be hundreds of messages per hour — but it is hard to focus on both a smartphone screen and the surrounding action, and team members on the ground are likely too busy to read all of the messages, so important messages can be overlooked.

    Therefore:

    Station one or two team members off-site, in a comfortable location with full-size devices and reliable network access, and give them access to all of the relevant communications channels. These folks can answer questions, route messages to relevant people or channels, and post announcements that need to be seen widely.

    Discussion:

    To increase information flow between the off-site comms team and the action leads, they can be on a live voice call during the course of the action. When paired with earbuds, this allows the on-site action leads to keep their phones in their pockets, while still ensuring they’re kept informed of relevant chat activity, and allowing them to request the posting of announcements at the appropriate moments.

    The off-site comms role is described above as a part of large actions with dozens or hundreds of team members, but it can also be useful in small but potentially-intense actions, such as ICE watch or rapid response. In such cases, the off-site comms person may be idle for most or all of an action, but is available to act as a bridge to call for backup from local or regional chats if things suddenly escalate.

    The off-site comms team doesn’t need to be located near the action — they could be a thousand miles away — but they do need to understand the geography of the area so that when people mention locations or landmarks, they have a clear picture of where things are happening. Studying a map might be sufficient, but actual time on those streets is better.

    It helps if the off-site comms team has a written description of the action — either informal notes or a detailed action plan — including locations and schedules. (In practice, the action might well diverge from the plan, but it’s still a useful reference.)

    In some areas of New York City, the off-site comms team can use the city’s public traffic cameras to observe crowds and traffic at key intersections.

    History:

    We stumbled onto this tactic in 2025 while working on Good Trouble and No Kings, but it’s been independently explored by others; for example, a number of BLM actions used off-site comms in 2020–21.

  • Meet Your Neighbors, June 11

    With the coming of summer, we figured it was time for another hyper-local social gathering — just a couple dozen neighbors, some seasonal fruit punch, and information about local progressive candidates.

  • Checking for Street Closures

    When planning a protest in New York City, it’s a good idea to check your intended location for other events on the same date, so you don’t try to march a thousand people down an avenue only to discover that there’s a street fair happening along the way.

    Unfortunately, New York is so big that there’s no single comprehensive calendar of events, so you’ll need to check a few different sites — and even then, you can’t be sure you’ve found them all.

    The first place to check are these official city listings:

    You can also check for street fairs and cultural festivals on these public websites, each of which seems to have a different selection of events:

    As the date approaches, you might also want to check for last-minute traffic updates:

  • Flashback: Marshaling at May Day in 1937

    A fellow marshal recently shared a New York Times article from 1937 which includes a discussion of the use of marshals as a new experiment in that year’s May Day march:

    May Day was observed in New York yesterday with a parade, special meetings, music and song in a celebration without precedent for size and orderliness. […]

    The order was hailed by the May Day committee as a masterpiece of “workers’ discipline.” As an experiment, the committee had obtained police sanction in providing its own corps of marshals. Identified by red arm bands, the marshals kept lanes open, crowds back and performed other such police work.

    Time after time as the marchers filed through a fifteen-foot lane in the crowd at the north end of the square, the announcer who was calling out the designations of various local unions through loudspeakers asked the spectators to fall back and make the lane wider. “Let’s show that workers maintain discipline,” his voice boomed again and again. “We don’t want mounted cops to push us back. Let’s push back ourselves and show worker discipline.”

    Thereupon the marshals, girls in white sweaters and men in white shirts, would push with might and main, the crowd would give a few feet and a little later reclaim the given space. The police watched and grinned and every one seemed pleased.

    There are some other fascinating details in here that make it worth reading the entire article:

    Page A1 of the May 2, 1937 issue of The New York Times, “70,000 HERE MARK ORDERLY MAY DAY; 35,000 in Eight-Hour Parade Stage Gay Demonstration […] Workers’ Own Marshals Keep Discipline […]“

  • Mapping the Crowd at No Kings 3

    I made a series of diagrams to help record and understand the extent and progress of the crowd at the No Kings 3 march in New York City.

    The charts show how quickly several contingents were able to move along the route, including ones at the front, middle, and back of the march.

    (The timeline data is based on Signal chatter and overhead photographs, and I’m sure it contains many small measurement errors, but I think the overall shape is accurate.)

    Observations

    The charts help to visualize a few notable elements of the march dynamics:

    • The Seventh Avenue front moved very slowly from 56th to around 50th (around 5 minutes per block), due to severe media congestion around celebrities marching with the front banner, then sped up to our “normal” speed (around 3 minutes per block) after they left the march.
    • The Broadway front started from further north, but got ahead of the Seventh Avenue front and had to wait to ensure it didn’t reach Times Square first — then, once in Times Square, it paused there, as scheduled, to allow space between the two sets of banners.
    • A wave of people who had gathered along Seventh Avenue south of 57th Street were misled by police movement ahead of the march and accidentally left before the front banners, forming a false front that arrived in Times Square more than twenty minutes ahead of the main march. The accessibility contingent got caught up in this, and remained ahead of the lead banners until 42nd Street.
    • Groups in the middle and back moved very slowly down to Times Square, then sped up after passing the congestion at the merge point.
    • When the march was about to step off at 2:00, between a third and half of the crowd was south of 58th Street.
    • Marching at half speed (5-6 minutes per block) can be frustrating — but it’s better than barely moving at all while waiting to march.

    Diagrams

    The charts are available as a PDF file and also attached below; you can click to enlarge.