The former chief of the city’s Department of Investigation cultivated a small arsenal at the agency — spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on handguns, body armor and ammunition, a source said Friday.
Former DOI head Mark Peters, who was fired by Mayor de Blasio in November, defended buying the weapons and other tactical gear in a statement to The New York Times.
“Are you suggesting it would have been better if we sent people out without bulletproof vests?” Peters told the Times.
“The NYPD provides weapons to its officers. We are an independent law enforcement agency, among other things tasked with looking at the NYPD For us to send people out into the field ill-equipped would put them in danger and would be irresponsible.”
Before Peters became chief of DOI in 2014, the agency owned no guns, according to the report.
But under his leadership, the agency bought 140 Glock 9-millimeter pistols, spent $155,000 on ammunition, $140,000 on body armor and another $54,000 for night-vision goggles, while also expanding the number of peace officers employed there.
The agency also spent $86,750 on a video game shooting simulator to practice without firing a real weapon, a source with knowledge of the purchase said.
The weaponizing of DOI — which investigates other city agencies — wasn’t widely known because the purchases were made with federal forfeiture money awarded to the agency after the CityTime corruption scandal in 2014.
Peters funded the weapons purchases with $27 million in federal forfeiture money granted to the department after the scandal — funds that are not tracked with the same scrutiny given to money in the city budget.