These rules will be added to the police patrol guide, as a matter of internal department policy, but will not become city law.

“This is change; this is reform; this is moving forward,” Ms. Mark-Viverito told The Times. The police commissioner, William Bratton, who testified strenuously against the measures, is no doubt satisfied. But Council members and police-reform advocates feel betrayed.

They say the backroom deal is a poor substitute for the Right to Know Act, which they said was more stringent than Ms. Mark-Viverito’s compromise and applied to far more of the everyday encounters that officers have with civilians on the street. They also say the compromise, lacking the force of law, gives far too much power to the commissioner to impose, enforce, change or reverse the rules at will — and to rank-and-file officers to ignore them with impunity.

Ms. Mark-Viverito’s defense of the deal is unpersuasive. She says the Right to Know Act would most likely have become ensnared in time-consuming litigation, on grounds that the city is exceeding its authority under state law. But supporters of the act, like the New York Civil Liberties Union, see no obstacles to the city’s taking legislative action to prevent abusive policing. If Ms. Mark-Viverito believed the act was vulnerable to legal challenges, she should have worked with the Council to fix it.