THIS week I want to take a moment to thank those readers who during the last year and a half have sent in questions.
Answering them is always an interesting and engaging process for me, and in many cases I've learned things. The editor of the paper usually sends me one or two questions at a time - he likes to have one answer in the bank.
Editors, I've learned, like to stock their cupboards with copy.
I want to reiterate the fact that I don't choose which questions to answer. I have answered them all, other than duplications, each in its time. I committed at the outset to answering any question you may ask, and that commitment has been supported by the process by which those questions reach me: they go to the editor, who in turn sends them to me. I don't see them, and certainly don't have an opportunity to vet them, before choosing which to answer.
What is your most popular topic of inquiry? The vast majority of questions you have asked have been about traffic and driving rules. The Motor Vehicle Act, with its many complexities and intricacies, regularly yields new, interesting and often arcane bits of information for those in the businesses of interpreting its rules and guiding their application. Interestingly, those questions surrounding the police that typically proliferate in the media, the ones that arise from tragic, often highly controversial incidents, and which raise difficult, divisive issues, have seldom come across my desk. Despite appearances, we are, it seems, more concerned with how to navigate a traffic circle than we are with these difficult items.
In the hope that it might inspire some new questions of a different sort, I want to rekindle thought about the reason I started this column. As your police service, the RCMP is committed to remaining transparent and accessible to you. I began this column because I wanted to provide an open, nonthreatening and objectively moderated venue for discussing the questions you've always had but have never had a chance, or felt comfortable enough, to ask. You must know that in that gesture is no equivocation. Anything you ask, I will answer.
Yet, if you haven't already guessed it by now, this week I find myself without a question to answer. Have I really exhausted the repositories of your inquiring minds? I cannot believe this to be so.
Folks, don't make me turn this column into an opinion piece or an editorial, for the beauty of its format is that it allows us to chat in a way that permits everyone to eavesdrop; to lose that, I think, would ruin the magic.
I will say this again: any question you have, I will answer. Feel free to be creative. Feel free to try to dispel the myths of shows like CSI and Law & Order. Feel free to rant, to disagree, to poke a stick at a hornet's nest; I promise not to sting.
If the editor doesn't hear from you, I will be forced to tell my superiors that our citizens have no more questions of their police. If that happens, then I feel we've truly achieved something newsworthy.
Sgt. Peter DeVries Professional Standards Unit North Vancouver RCMP Follow Peter on Twitter at www. twitter.com/rcmpdevries
If you have a question for Ask a Cop, email it to editor@nsnews. com or mail it to the attention of the editor, North Shore News, Suite 100 - 126 East 15th St., North Vancouver, B.C., V7L 2P9.
