Gov. Paterson today is expected to sign a controversial bill that would delete an NYPD database with the names of hundreds of thousands of people who were stopped and frisked but never arrested, sources said.

The measure has been as strongly favored by minority lawmakers in the state Legislature as it has been reviled by law enforcement and Mayor Bloomberg.

This week, all five Democratic candidates for attorney general called on Paterson to sign the bill to nix portions of the “250 database,” so called because of the number on the form filed to the database.

Three sources told The Post last night that the governor was expected to sign the bill this morning at a planned event in Manhattan.

“Albany has robbed us of a great crime-fighting tool, one that saved lives,” Commissioner Ray Kelly fumed.

“Without it, there will be, inevitably, killers and other criminals who won’t be captured as quickly or perhaps ever. They’ll be free to threaten our neighborhoods longer than they would have been otherwise.”

While some 12 percent of stop-and-frisks wind up with an arrest or summons, Kelly insisted the database has been invaluable in crime-fighting.

That info has been important in identifying suspects in 178 criminal cases — including 17 murders — over the last 18 months, he said.

The mayor’s spokesman, Stu Loeser, added, “We’re disappointed that police officers will be denied an important tool they have been using to solve crimes and prevent others.”

Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and state Sen. Eric Adams, both Brooklyn Democrats, sponsored legislation to erase certain information in the database from the police stops.

The bill would prohibit police from storing personal information — such as name, Social Security number and address — of individuals stopped by the police and released without further legal action.

But the database would still include a record of the stop, including the person’s age and race and the place and reason for the stop.

Adams — a former NYPD captain — has argued the “stop, question, and frisk” form “began to be abused” during the Giuliani administration and “the current NYPD administration has taken the misuse to another level.”

Since the bill’s introduction, the issue has been a lightning rod for controversy, with the New York Civil Liberties Union denouncing the stop-and-frisk policy as targeting blacks and Latinos — and the database as an invasion of privacy.

The group contends that in Brownsville, Brooklyn, “which has one of the city’s highest stop-and-frisk rates,” 99 percent of 52,000 police stops since 2004 targeted blacks.

It claims less than 1 percent ended in an arrest.

“That is an unbelievably poor yield rate for such an intrusive, wasteful and humiliating tactic,” the group charged.

(Source: NY Post)