Allow "top" police officers to be recruited directly

Above:  Lucy Manning, ITV News, highlighted the story on her Twitter microblog earlier today.

Main story on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning was the proposal to allow "top" police officers to be recruited directly instead of working their way up through the ranks.

I am not keen on this idea.  Either it will result in an "officer class" emerging, made up of public school Oxbridge types, and yet another institution will become alienated from ordinary people.  Or it will become an exercise in diversity window dressing, with random people inserted into senior and responsible positions for no other reason than that they match an arbitrary diversity template (one thinks of Bonnie Greer on the Trustees of the British Museum).

I am also concerned that we seem to be introducing throughout public life a policy of positive discrimination without this appearing explicitly in any manifesto or having been voted for by the people.

In a front page article in the Guardian the argument for positive discrimination was forcefully made on Monday:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/27/law-police-diversity

The article included an extremely provocative quote by Peter Fahy from the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) saying that "policing... needs to be legitimate within the community".

Presumably this is the policing-with-consent insisted on by David Lammy MP (and many others) for BME communities in London and other major cities.

Since the Guardian and Peter Fahy have raised the issue of legitimacy, do they mind if I ask what legitimacy exists to justify large-scale inflow of BME migrants into British cities in the first place?  A very provocative question to ask I know, but calling for migrant legitimacy is perhaps no more provocative than calling for police legitimacy.  And was it not always going to be the case that illegitimate migration would eventually lead to this policing disconnect?