City lawmakers reached a deal Tuesday to install an inspector general to monitor the New York Police Department, a plan galvanized by outrage over its extensive use of the tactic known as stop and frisk and its widespread spying on Muslims.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced the pact on creating a new watchdog for the nation’s biggest police department and said talks were progressing on three companion proposals to set new rules surrounding stop and frisk, including banning racial profiling.

The movement on the measures comes amid a federal trial over the department’s use of stop and frisk, and it follows a series of stories by The Associated Press that revealed how city police systematically listened in on sermons, hung out at cafes and other public places, infiltrated colleges and photographed people as part of a broad effort to prevent terrorist attacks.

“We came to a very important agreement” on the plan for an inspector general, which would be housed within the city’s existing Department of Investigation, Quinn said by phone Tuesday. The agency that acts as an inspector general for many other arms of the city government, but it historically hasn’t kept tabs on the NYPD.

The pact could set up a showdown between the council and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose administration has opposed the idea as unnecessary. Quinn said she believed the council had the votes to pass the plan and override a mayoral veto, if necessary.

Bloomberg’s office referred calls to the NYPD, which said it already gets plenty of oversight from its 700-person Internal Affairs Bureau, a civilian complaint board, a police corruption commission, prosecutors, judges and a 1985 federal court settlement that set guidelines for its intelligence-gathering.

“No police department in America has more oversight than the NYPD,” chief police spokesman Paul Browne said in a statement.

Inspectors general – officials with investigative powers – are a common feature of government agencies, including in law enforcement and intelligence. The FBI and the CIA have such inspectors, as do police forces including the Los Angeles Police Department.

Civil rights advocates and others have said it’s time for the same in the NYPD.

The IG “will enhance the effectiveness of the department, and at the same time will increase the public’s confidence in the police force,” Quinn said in a statement.

The NYPD has said that its surveillance is legal and that stop and frisk – a technique of stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking people who are seen as acting suspiciously but who don’t necessarily meet the probable-cause standard for arrest – has helped drive crime down to record lows and save lives by taking weapons off the street. About 5 million people have been stopped during the past decade, mostly black and Hispanic men.

The other proposals under discussion would require officers to explain why they are stopping people, tell them when they have a right to refuse a search and hand out business cards identifying themselves. Another would give people more latitude to sue over stops they considered biased.

Councilmen Brad Lander and Jumaane Williams, who sponsored all the proposals, said they appreciated the “productive negotiations,” but lawmakers needed to go further than the inspector general proposal.

“Any legislative response by the City Council should at a minimum prohibit discriminatory policing, based on racial or other profiling,” they said in a statement. “New York will only be truly safe when communities trust the police.”

(AP)