Top NYC prober is no puppet YOAV GONEN

WHEN Mayor de Blasio appointed him as the government’s top investigator in 2014, there was good reason to think DOI Commissioner Mark Peters would end up as the mayor’s stooge.

After all, Peters had served as de Blasio’s campaign treasurer.

If anybody was going to expose the administration’s shortcomings, it sure wouldn’t be someone who helped put de Blasio into City Hall, argued the critics.

But over the past year, Peters has demonstrated that he’s his own man — producing scathing reports on life-and-death failings at the child-welfare agency and at the Housing Authority.

He’s also one of the few officials in the government willing to chastise City Hall, which he did Friday in extraordinary fashion after uncovering misconduct by the city’s jails chief.

When de Blasio took to the radio to defend his jails commissioner with flimsy excuses, Peters served up a blunt and unprecedented rebuke.

“There can be no defense of this behavior, and City Hall harms government integrity by even trying,” said Peters. Mic drop, law-and-order style. Peters, who previously ran for Brooklyn district attorney and who is likely to run for office again, would argue his objectivity was never in question.

But his reports — and his public statements — developed a sharper edge after de Blasio sided with former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton over a controversial June 2016 DOI report.

That report concluded that a decrease in quality-of-life summonses sparked no increase in felony crime between 2010 and 2015.

Bratton took the findings as an affront to his beloved policing tactic known as “broken windows” and ripped DOI’s report as “basically useless.”

Stuck in the middle, de Blasio sided with his police chief.

“The core findings, we don’t see merit in,” the mayor said.

The next month, DOI hammered City Hall for allowing a property it controlled to be flipped for a $72 million private profit. Peters even knocked the mayor’s lawyers for obstructing the investigation.

Far from being a stooge, Peters has become the strongest independent voice in the administration.