What’s that? Are you kidding me? That’s amazing!! It could be the greatest thing I’ve ever seen!!
OK, now what were we talking about? Oh, yeah, can you believe it’s raining?
It’s funny how quickly we observe things and then just move along.
But a good journalist shouldn’t just move along. Observing things and then realizing there might be a story there is a strong attribute.
This Sunday, you’ll see a story that really resulted from observational journalism. It’s about Clark County Sheriff Garry Lucas.
Like many of us, Lucas is on the road a lot. Coming to work. Going home. Out to lunch. Over to a meeting. You get the idea.
But Lucas is different, and not simply because he’s in law enforcement. He’s different because when he became the county’s top cop and got behind a desk, he never really left the road.
So when he’s on the pavement, going from here to there, well, he can’t resist pulling people over when he sees someone doing something wrong.
Frankly, if you’re driving the I-5 and you haven’t seen a mustachioed gentleman in a pale blue sedan pulling someone over, you haven’t been observant enough. That would be Lucas.
But, hey, maybe all top sheriffs do this stuff. We didn’t know. So we checked. Reporter Bob Albrecht took on the task of calling every sheriff in every Washington county.
You might be surprised about what we found. You’ll see those results in our front-page story Sunday. And you’ll also hear from Lucas on how many of those stops result in tickets.
It will be only in The Columbian’s print edition.
Our polls
Not sure how many of you partake in our Web polls, but they’re interesting, sometimes fun and almost always begin a community conversation on the topic.
It’s not unusual to get about 1,000 votes. And the audience is growing.
When we had to take down the poll feature for a couple of weeks, we heard about it.
“No one else ever asks my opinion on anything. Your poll does,” one kind reader said.
To be sure, they are unscientific. We aren’t picking folks at random, and we have no idea how diverse the voters are.
Still, I’ve found them to be relatively accurate when compared with scientific polls.
We recently did a poll on Arizona’s new law requiring police to determine whether people they stop are in the country illegally.
Our unscientific poll showed only 21 percent of the respondents felt the law went too far.
Then I read where an Associated Press-Univision poll found 20 percent said the law went too far.
The questions weren’t exactly the same, the makeup of those polled wasn’t the same, but, generally speaking, we came up with about the same percentage as the scientific poll did.
So log in, vote and get involved. Your (unofficial) vote matters, and constructive conversation can only make us all better.
Lou Brancaccio is The Columbian’s editor. Reach him at 360-735-4505 or lou.brancaccio@columbian.com.
