To police officials, a computer database full of the names and addresses of people questioned by officers in millions of street stops in New York City is a core tool in their fight to keep reducing crime.

The officials argue that the files — which include information about people never actually arrested or charged — have fed detectives essential clues for making arrests, particularly in some high-profile bias and hate crimes.

But to an increasing array of lawmakers, the database represents an unconstitutional inventory of mostly young blacks and Hispanics, many of whom, although they are determined to have done nothing wrong, have their names and addresses in the hands of a powerful law enforcement agency. There have been roughly three million street stops in New York since 2004, and by one count, 9 in 10 of the people stopped by the police were not accused of any crime or violation.

Now the debate has shifted to whether Gov. David A. Paterson should sign or veto a legislative remedy.

The State Senate and the Assembly passed a bill that would prohibit the police from saving the personal data of people who are stopped but not arrested or fined.

The bill has yet to land on the governor’s desk, but one sponsor, Senator Eric L. Adams, a Brooklyn Democrat, said that in a conversation on Wednesday night, Mr. Paterson “stated to me he sees no problem with getting this bill signed into law.”

Earlier Wednesday, when asked if he would sign the bill, Mr. Paterson said he would have to read it first. But he gave some hint of where he stood, saying, “I don’t see why you have a database on people who have not been found to do anything wrong, but just how far the bill goes is something I’ll take a look at.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg “will urge the governor to veto the bill,” a spokesman, Jason Post, said. By limiting the information that the Police Department “can record, electronically, in stop and frisks, the ability of police to solve subsequent crimes will be limited,” Mr. Post said.

Senator Martin J. Golden, a Republican from Brooklyn who is a retired city police officer, said, “I think it’s a disgrace this legislation passed, and I hope the governor vetoes it.” Stripping officers of their ability to log the names of those stopped, he said, is “like handcuffing the police.”

Mr. Adams said the bill’s backers’ quarrel was not with the stop-and-frisk practice itself, which he called a “great crime-fighting tool,” but with the policy of indefinitely keeping the names of innocent people, which he called “unacceptable, not only in New York, but in America.” For that reason, said Mr. Adams, a retired New York City police captain, “we have abused the tool.”

The police, in executing their stop-and-frisk strategy, are supposed to question people who they have a reasonable belief might have committed or are about to commit a crime. But in hundreds of thousands of instances, according to Police Department data, officers have stopped people on the street without citing specific reasons.

In the run-up to the bill’s passage, Bloomberg administration officials, representing the Police Department, and lawmakers could not reach a compromise, several people said.

The mayor’s “team in Albany was in conversations with the bill’s sponsors, but couldn’t come to any agreement,” Mr. Post said on Thursday. Mr. Adams said the city had rebuffed a suggestion to allow the police to keep the names of people stopped by officers for six months.

In the end, Mr. Adams said there was no option but to bring the measure to the floor. A concerted fight by Mr. Bloomberg’s representatives and the Police Department to beat it back failed, Mr. Golden said.

The Senate passed the bill on June 23, by a vote of 32 to 29, and the Assembly approved it six days later, by a vote of 85 to 55.

In May, the New York Civil Liberties Union sued the Police Department and its commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, on behalf of a smaller group of people whose names are in the police database: those who were either issued a violation or arrested in street stops but later cleared of criminal charges or fined for a noncriminal violation.

Donna Lieberman, the civil liberties group’s executive director, said the police practice of keeping names was tantamount to a “regime of ‘round up the usual suspects.’ ”

Commissioner Kelly, speaking after a promotion ceremony at Police Headquarters on Friday, warned that if the governor signed the measure, the public would suffer.

“I think it’s a huge mistake,” Mr. Kelly said. “I think the public will be the loser for this. It appears that certain politicians think that crime has gone low enough and we need it to go back up. It makes no sense.”

Mr. Kelly repeated his belief in the value of the database as an investigative tool and said that the department was open to the notion of keeping names for a set period before eliminating them — which he said the department had proposed.

“We’ll see what happens,” Mr. Kelly said. “But I think the loser ultimately will be the public, because it impinges on the Police Department’s ability to do investigations and to solve crimes.”

(Source: NY Times)