None of the city’s officers currently wear body cameras, despite a 2013 federal court order requiring that the Police Department create a large-scale pilot program using the devices. That program, overseen by a court-appointed monitor, was set to begin this year and stemmed from the court’s decision against the city in a lawsuit over its stop-and-frisk practices.

But the planning between the city and a vendor for a pilot program cannot normally begin until a contract is registered. That the body-camera contract would have to be refiled with the comptroller added a delay to a program that had already been redesigned once by the federal monitor and has yet to be rolled out on the streets.

Austin Finan, a spokesman for the mayor, said the procurement process had been “rigorous and extensive” and that it was “baffling that anybody would stand in the way of greater transparency and the deployment of these important policing tools.”

The Police Department has around 36,000 uniformed members, though not all work in a patrol function. It was not immediately clear how many would wear body cameras under the mayor’s proposal.

Mr. de Blasio said on Friday he was confident the Police Department and the city could quickly expand the program from an initial group of 1,000 officers, to roughly 5,000 and then to the whole patrol force.