Our bobbies need to start marching to a different beat Is it possible to reform the police? It is certainly necessary. Every politician says that there are lots of brave, decent, hard-working officers prepared to sacrifice their lives in the line of duty - and so there are. But there are also quite a lot of cowardly, lazy and incompetent ones. As Tom Winsor's review of police pay and conditions found, many police officers are not up to the work they're meant to do: they're too fat to walk comfortably, let alone to chase a burglar. In the Met, for instance, about 22 per cent of serving male officers are obese. But they can't be sacked, because the police's "special conditions of service" mean that the only basis for removing an officer is if he is guilty of gross misconduct. Mr Winsor found that the police are paid 10 to 15 per cent more than other emergency workers, and frequently do less work. Only in one in 10 of recorded crimes do the police detect the perpetrator, and only in half those cases does the detection lead to a charge or summons. As many people who have called the police to investigate a burglary will also have discovered, officers often appear uninterested in collecting evidence and don't bother to take the most elementary steps to catch the criminals. They sympathise with your predicament, but they don't do anything about it, except to send you a note giving you a crime number so you can claim on the insurance. And if we who live in relatively low-crime, middle-class neighbourhoods think the police are reluctant to turn up and do what they're paid for, it is even worse in the poor areas where most crime gets committed: officers often won't even enter those places. They think it's too dangerous. It is not often recognised that the form-filling culture that characterises much of the British police is the creation of the police themselves. The official inspectorate noted that sergeants are frequently unable to get constables to comply with their orders, but don't dare force the issue, because they fear being the subject of an investigation and allegation of bullying. A proportion of the constables who stay in the office and out of danger are there because they prefer form-filling to crime-fighting. The Winsor Report suggested various measures to tackle those problems, such as relating pay to performance; making inability to do the job sufficient for sacking an officer; and increasing minimum length of service before retirement. But reforms of that kind were suggested 20 years ago by Patrick Sheehy, and they were effectively seen off by the police. The Police Federation, the force's union, has already started its campaign to get the reforms abandoned. A demonstration last Thursday protesting against any changes in London was attended by between 20,000 and 30,000 officers. PC Julie Nesbit sums up the Federation's case: "We are the public service, without whom the other public services couldn't function, and therefore we should be treated according to that" - by which she means, differently. Coppers should be allowed to keep their benefits, their immunity to being sacked, and retirement on full pension at 50 or younger, not because it is fair, but because they have the country over a barrel. The Coalition may be forced to agree: like every government, it depends on the police. The first duty of any state is to maintain social order, and the police have one effective threat: they can make it more likely that social order will collapse. They don't have to strike. They can just not co-operate. Will the Conservatives face them down, if the cost is watching their reputation as the party of law and order evaporate, with calamitous consequences for their prospects at the next election? It is not impossible. But it is much more likely that a face-saving compromise will be agreed, and those fat policemen will be allowed to keep collecting their fat salaries for doing nothing but sitting in the office filling in forms.