Home Office officials want to introduce graduate trainee police inspectors. This could attract many young people of ability

As John Reid, the Home Secretary, finds his way around his new department, his state of mind, given the position of the government and the fate of his predecessor, is probably defensive. He is more likely to be trying to identify the next big problem coming down the pipeline than seeking out the best opportunities to make a difference during his tenure. This is a pity, because somewhere in those red boxes there is the raw material for an initiative that not only could bring substantial benefits to society, but conforms precisely to the agenda of reform and modernisation to which he is so attached. Somewhere in the depths of his department, people are thinking of ways to improve the police service.

The idea is a simple one: our police have become insulated from the rest of the population not just by tradition and culture, but structurally. There is just one point of entry, at constable level, and the overwhelming majority of the intake is made up of people in their late teens and early twenties. They stay, typically, for either 20 or 30 years and then retire. Pause for a moment to think what that means. For the most part, police officers have little or no experience of other walks of life. Their skills are acquired internally; in other words, their practices are learned from each other. Their career and management structures include only people with similar training and a broadly similar experience of life.

There are not many professional cultures like this and there can be very few indeed in the service industries (and these days we have a police service, not a police force). This cannot be healthy.

It would be wrong to trace all the problems of modern policing to this same root, but it would be equally wrong to underestimate its importance. There are notorious difficulties, for example, across the range of diversity issues, most notably in the unequal application of stop-and-search. There is the canteen culture, reinforcing collective attitudes and assumptions. There are questions about competence at every level - problems we tend to see in moments of crisis such as the Soham case, the Deepcut investigations and the de Menezes killing, but which it would be naive to assume are not present at other times. Most of us work in environments that are much more diverse, at least in the sense that people of various backgrounds enter at different levels, bringing with them varied abilities, ideas and attitudes. Most of us see the advantages; in fact, we would find it hard to imagine the workplace any other way. It seems reasonable to expect that the police service would benefit from professional openness of this kind.

The current proposal is a modest one. No one is suggesting that we should recruit police managers from Asda or PC World, or that a corps of specialist civilian detectives should be created (though these are ideas worth discussing). Instead, Home Office officials want to introduce graduate trainee police inspectors. This, it is reasonably argued, might attract into the service some of the many young people of ability who, as we know, are put off by the idea of starting a career on the beat, in uniform.

This is a real problem, and a paradoxical one. We are a nation addicted to fictional law enforcement, from The Bill to the novels of P D James, and we have no end of fictional police role models. That should give us a vast pool of young people wanting to do the job, from which we could select the very best. Yet almost 80 per cent of students wouldn't dream of applying to work for the police.

So, when the graduate trainee inspectors idea reaches Reid, will he seize on it as something positive he can do, a modernisation he can effect? He will know that reforming the police is always difficult: look at the problems Charles Clarke faced over reducing the number of police forces. He will know that the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Police Federation will resist such a change as elitist (having more than one kind of recruitment, they believe, is just plain bad) and dangerous (no one who hasn't been a constable could possibly manage crowd control or investigate a murder). Such arguments are a symptom of the problem, for few people in other modern workplaces would recognise or accept such logic. Reid should back the proposal.

The great escape

He is an escapologist and illusionist whose stunts have captivated audiences around the world. A self-publicist adored in America though less popular in the UK, he professes to be humbled by the support he receives. An admirer of the Great Houdini, he has come back from the dead several times. His astonishing powers of survival impress admirers and detractors alike.

In recent days the world has watched him perform from inside his giant glass bubble as he tried to set a world record for endurance. Rolling television news captured every dramatic moment.

Initially he resisted all attempts to get him out, but eventually the decision was taken to rescue him, before it was too late. Despite the pain, he says he is undeterred and will carry on. His surname begins with the letters B, L, A and I.

Who is this genius, this man of courage?

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