Twelve years back, a former New York police commissioner spoke with disdain of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s get-tough police tactics, particularly the stopping and frisking of thousands of men, most of them black or Latino.

“A large reservoir of good will was under construction” before Mr. Giuliani, he told the City Bar Association. “It was called community policing. But it was quickly abandoned for tough-sounding rhetoric and dubious stop-and-frisk tactics that sowed new seeds of community mistrust.”

In 2002, that man, Raymond W. Kelly, returned as police commissioner.

In that year, the police stopped and questioned 97,296 New Yorkers; 82 percent of them walked away without so much as a ticket. Nine years later, in 2011, his officers stopped 685,724 New Yorkers; 88 percent of them were also completely innocent. A vast majority were black or Latino men.

Perhaps most striking, Mr. Kelly offers no apology for his embrace of a tactic he once reviled. At a recent hearing, Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito nearly pleaded for a less hostile approach. “There needs to be prevention and deeper community-based tactics and strategy,” she said.