MAYOR BACKS BILL TO MAKE POLICE REPORT RACE IN FRISKS

In an agreement that ended months of sparring at City Hall, Mayor Rudolph
W. Giuliani gave his support yesterday to a City Council bill that would
require the police to release information on the race of those stopped and
frisked by officers. Supporters of the bill said it might help address
allegations of racial profiling by the Police Department.

The mayor's support for the bill, which he announced at a morning news
conference with Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, came after he won a
significant concession on how the search figures would be analyzed.

The mayor's support, coupled with the bill's unanimous passage by a Council
committee in the afternoon, is believed to remove the last barriers to a
measure that would provide an unprecedented statistical snapshot of the
40,000-member police force. The bill is expected to win easy passage before
the full Council next month.

"When that bill was first proposed I said that I believed that we could
reach an agreement on it, that there were many things that we felt were
appropriate to report," the mayor said. "I am very happy to say we have
been able to reach an agreement."

While the Giuliani administration and the Police Department had been
quarreling with the Council over this measure for much of the year, the
issue of just how much information the mayor thinks the public should
receive about policing has persisted for years. The mayor has sometimes
even gone to court to oppose requests for information from news
organizations, elected officials and others seeking access to police arrest
records.

The bill, which was written by the Council speaker, Peter F. Vallone, a
candidate for the Democratic mayoral nomination, also calls on the
department to issue quarterly reports including such previously unavailable
information as precise figures for the number of officers in each of the
city's 76 precincts. It also requires that crime reports be expanded to
include response times and each officer's overtime statistics.

The most closely watched provisions, and the ones most objectionable to law
enforcement officials, were those regarding the stop-and-frisk statistics.
Mr. Vallone and other supporters of the bill -- including two groups, 100
Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care and the Latino Officers' Association --
argued that statistics on the race and sex of those stopped, frisked and
arrested were vital to determine whether city officers engage in racial
profiling.

"A tremendous change and a welcome change, welcome from every standpoint,"
said Mr. Vallone. The public is entitled to the information, he said, "so
that when these statistics are revealed we'll know the truth of what
actually is going on in this town."

While anecdotal accounts of profiling by the department have echoed in
minority communities for years, they gained more political resonance last
year when State Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer reported that
African-Americans were little more than a quarter of the city's population,
but more than half of those stopped and arrested by the police.

Mayor Giuliani and law enforcement officials, however, have said that such
comparisons can make the number of arrests seem disproportionately high.
Instead, he said, statistics should reflect the race of the people making
reports to the police, to show that the officers are not pursuing minority
suspects without cause.

The officers are following the information that is given to them, the mayor
said. "Their activity is generated totally by the information that they are
given, largely by the same group, race and ethnic background as the person
who allegedly assaulted them."

A compromise on the issue was reached in part, Mr. Vallone said, because
both sides agreed to measure arrests using the mayor's standard.

Commissioner Kerik, who also endorsed the bill yesterday at the news
conference, said the department would work with Council members to provide
the information. The city and the department are doing more than ever
before "to have open access" to police records, the commissioner said.

Mr. Vallone said the first reports would be prepared 60 days after the
mayor signed the bill and would be accessible on the Police Department's
Web site.

He praised the commissioner and the mayor's agreement. "The perception is
that when you are withholding information, you have something to hide," he
said. "And to the Police Department's credit and to the mayor's credit,
they understood that. And it's much better to get this information out. If
there's nothing to hide, fine. If there is something to hide, let's get rid
of it."

The speaker also said the agreement might be a response to increased public
scrutiny stemming from the deaths of Patrick Dorismond and Amadou Diallo at
the hands of police officers and the torture of Abner Louima in a Brooklyn
station house.

"There's an old saying that I think is coming to roost today, that out of
every evil some good must come," Mr. Vallone said. "Unfortunately, it took
two deaths and a torture to bring to the forefront that lack of information
and lack of disclosure can be much more dangerous and harmful to a society
than full disclosure."