Sold defective armor to feds

THE PARENT company of the firm chosen by the de Blasio administration to equip the NYPD with body cameras previously paid a $30 million fine for selling defective body armor to the feds, the Daily News has learned.

Safariland Group — then known as Armor Holdings — paid the whopping sum to the Justice Department in 2008 after an investigation found that the company made and sold the vests knowing they were using defective materials, records show.

Safariland is the parent company of Vievu, the firm awarded a $6.4 million contract to provide 5,000 body cameras to the NYPD in a pilot program. If hired to supply the cameras to all 35,000 NYPD officers, that contract could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

City Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx) said he found the disclosure “alarming.”

“There should have been a comparable evaluation of different products before the contract was awarded,” Torres said.

A high-ranking police official said the department was aware of the settlement and determined after an investigation that it wasn’t relevant to whether the subsidiary could supply the body cameras.

Police officials said a ninemember panel conducted an exhaustive review in the past year, looking at proposals from 28 companies. The number of prospective companies was whittled down to six, and Vievu was selected. The city controller has yet to sign off on the contract.

De Blasio officials said Vievu’s cameras are in use across the U.S. and in 17 countries.

The head of Safariland, Warren Kanders, 58, runs a web of military and law enforcement supply companies, and sits on the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art in the Meatpacking District.

Kanders was the chairman of Armor Holdings during the period when the vests containing defective material were sold between 1999 and 2005.

The material known as Zylon was actually manufactured by two other companies.

In 2003, an Oceanside, Calif., police officer was killed and a Pennsylvania cop was shot and wounded — both while they were wearing Zylon vests that failed to stop the bullets. Those vests were manufactured by Second Chance Body Armor.

In July 2007, the government sued a Zylon manufacturer called Toyobo. The suit named Armor Holdings as one of the buyers of the bad material. Kanders completed the sale of Armor Holdings to BAE Systems at the end of that month. In October 2008, Armor Holdings agreed to pay the government the $30 million fine.

Kanders then bought part of Armor Holdings from BAE Systems and renamed it Safariland in 2012. Safariland bought Vievu in June 2015.