By Nicole Flatow

The New York Police Department will erase hundreds of thousands of names and addresses it has collected of those stopped and frisked, in a settlement announced Wednesday.

Some NYPD data on stop-and-frisks is useful for tracking the breadth of the controversial practice now under fire both in court and by the City Council, and the city publishes demographic information on stop-and-frisks several times a year. But names and addresses of those stopped have been used by the NYPD in criminal investigations. “[I]f you got stopped on the street and were in the database, you were a target of an investigation even if you had done absolutely nothing wrong,” the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Christopher Dunn told the New York Law Journal. “This will end that completely.”

The database compounded the harms imposed by millions of NYPD stop-and-frisks performed over the course of the Bloomberg administration, particularly of young black men.

Read More NYPD Agrees To Purge Names Of Those Stopped And Frisked | ThinkProgress.