THE government may not know exactly what sort of police service it wants, but it certainly doesn't like the one it has. In November elected police commissioners were brought in to make forces more accountable to their constituencies. On January 30th proposals to offer direct entry at senior levels to non-policemen and foreigners were announced for consultation. It is hard to know which has more provoked the men and women in blue. For almost a century virtually everyone entering the police service has done so as a constable, pounding pavements and feeling collars for a couple of years before moving up. Even chief constables need operational credibility, it is said, to order junior officers to put their lives on the line. Part of the police ethos is that there is no formal division between officers and other ranks: schemes to attract graduates into policing and fast-track high-flyers have respected this notion. Crime has fallen dramatically, suggesting the system works. But questions about the quality of police leadership have cropped up repeatedly over the decades - not least in recent months, with endless headlines about "Plebgate," phone-hacking and the Hillsborough disaster. In 2010 the coalition government commissioned a review into police pay and conditions. The plans revealed this week reflect its ideas about expanding the talent pool at the top. Outstanding candidates are to be recruited at inspector level, trained within an inch of their lives, and then the best of them whisked up the ladder to chief constable. Another group with experience in other fields - business, soldiering and so forth - is to be invited in as superintendents. Policemen from other common-law countries will be eligible to lead police forces in England and Wales. Will these changes improve things? In principle they should. Most services and firms recruit from outside at higher levels. There is a difference between strategic and tactical decision-making. Other countries - the Netherlands, Italy, France - start some recruits higher up the police ladder than others and have not collapsed under the strain. But there are some imponderables that may prove to be drawbacks when fully pondered. One is how and where the high-flyers are to be trained. As Peter Neyroud, a former chief constable now at Cambridge University, points out, the new National Police College is a work in progress; farming out recruits to private-sector firms and universities may mean unequal standards; and either is likely to be costly. Another is whether it makes sense to broaden recruitment at a time when the police service is shrinking, and plenty of able police officers are already frustrated by blocked promotion prospects. A third is whether foreigners have so very much to offer as chief constables (the Conservatives have always been susceptible to the charms of Bill Bratton, a veteran American crime-buster) and, if so, whether gun-toting Americans are necessarily a better fit than, say, the non-common-law Dutch. The biggest question is whether promoting graduates and businessmen is the most pressing matter at hand. Sir Peter Fahy, chief constable of the Greater Manchester force, is one who argues that the lack of uniformed black and brown faces is an increasing barrier to effective policing as cities grow more diverse. Non-whites account for 14% of the total population, 5% of all police officers and just 2.8% of the top three ranks, less than a few years ago. This government has wrestled with the police almost as fiercely as Margaret Thatcher grappled with the miners. For all its intense efforts to reshape policing, it seems to be ignoring the big problem.