The Bloomberg administration has been unmoved by criticism of the stop-and-frisk program, steadfastly declaring that the tactic is necessary to keep crime down.

But in court papers made public on Wednesday, the city voluntarily scaled back on one aspect of stop-and-frisk practices: it agreed to remove hundreds of thousands of names from a database of information about New Yorkers collected during police stops.

The New York Police Department began building the database in 1999 to compile and review the information learned during stop-and-frisk encounters; the police said the database allowed investigators to quickly sift through information from millions of police stops for clues in their search for suspects or witnesses to a crime.

As the debate grew over the Police Department’s expanding use of the stop-and-frisk tactic, a 2010 state law forced the department to expunge from the database the names and addresses of people who were stopped but not subsequently charged with any crime or issued a summons.