New York -- The New York Civil Liberties Union Tuesday filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court challenging the NYPD’s refusal to disclose an electronic database detailing police stops of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, most of whom were black and Latino.

In July, the NYCLU served the NYPD with a formal legal request to turnover the database under the state’s Freedom of Information Law. The department rejected the request at the end of August and denied the NYCLU’s administrative appeal on October 15.

The NYCLU requested the information to allow for an independent analysis of the department’s stop-and-frisk practices, which have been the subject of enormous controversy since the 1999 shooting death of Amadou Diallo. The controversy was rekindled last February when the department, under pressure from the NYCLU, released printed reports revealing that more than half a million New Yorkers were stopped in 2006 alone.