Police officers are living in "ghettos" because there is a growing divide between officers and the public, the chairman of a police authority has said.
Kit Malthouse, who is London's deputy mayor with responsibility for policing and crime, said officers from Britain's largest force are living in villages in Surrey and Hertfordshire partly because of concerns over living in London.
He said there is a "growing divide between the police and the public, which is not yet at dangerous levels but may well become so".
Speaking to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, Mr Malthouse said: "Police officers now, certainly Metropolitan Police officers, often want to live in police ghettos, villages in Surrey and Hertfordshire, which are disproportionately over-populated with police officers because they like to live together."
The chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority said the growing divide between police and the public could be seen "in all sorts of ways".
Officers and police community support officers (PCSOs) "now don't like to travel in uniform because they don't want to be identified", he said, referring to an incident in Croydon two years ago in which two officers were attacked by "a baying mob" after confronting two young girls over dropping litter.
"No one came to their aid, quite the opposite," he said. "The public feels as it they have less and less investment in the police service. That sense of investment, and that sense of ownership of the police, has somehow deteriorated."
Giving evidence on the proposed role for directly elected police and crime commissioners, which will not apply in the capital where Mayor Boris Johnson oversees the Met, Mr Malthouse added that "putting a cross in the box, making a positive vote for somebody" might help improve the relationship".
His comments echoed the warning from Sir Denis O'Connor, Her Majesty's chief inspector of constabulary, who said that police "retreating from the streets" since the 1970s had enabled problems such as anti-social behaviour to gather momentum.
