Police are never called by certain minority communities because they administer their own justice even in cases as serious as murder and sexual assaults on children, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary has said.
Parts of Britain are operating their own forms of justice as some minority communities take the law into their own hands, the Tom Winsor has claimed.
Tom Winsor said that officers were never called to some neighbourhoods
He said that some ethnic communities are turning their backs on police and rarely, if ever, call them to deal with crimes as serious as murder and sexual assaults against children, instead dealing with them in their own way.
In an interview with The Times Mr Winsor praised the enrichment multiculturalism brings to the UK, but said that "when it comes to criminal justice we have one system and everyone, wherever they come from, is equal under the law and entitled to fair treatment by law enforcement agencies."
He told the newspaper that police were never called to some neighbourhoods as they "administer their own form of justice", stressing these "alternative" systems were run not by criminals but by “law-abiding people”.
Mr Winsor said: "There are some communities born under other skies who will not involve police at all. I am reluctant to name the communities in question but there are communities from other cultures who would prefer to police themselves.
"There are cities in the Midlands where the police never go because they are never called. They never hear of any trouble because the community deals with that on its own... They just have their own form of community justice."
Mr Winsor said some chief constables receive "close to zero" calls from some areas, and that police are not afraid to go to such areas, but that they do not know what is going on as communities do not tell them.
He said: "They don't know what injustices are being perpetrated... It's almost a closed book because we can't go there so don't know. It could be anything from low-level crime right up to murder... (Honour killings) are the most extreme example. That is murder. There is no honour in it."
Mr Winsor compared the situation in some parts of the UK to Northern Ireland during the Troubles, but said the difference now was that it was law-abiding citizens operating their only system of law, rather than criminal gangs.
Mr Winsor said the issue of alternative justice systems had to be tackled, and all communities encouraged to trust the police and the authorities “so that justice will be delivered according to the criminal justice system of this country and no other system”.
But series of high-profile blunders has left more than a quarter of Britons not trusting the police, a new poll revealed this week.