hen a series of large antiwar protests began nearly eight weeks ago, the New York Police Department started questioning hundreds of people arrested at the demonstrations about their prior political activity and recording the information in a database.

But yesterday, after the practice came to light, the Police Department said it would destroy the database, created with a debriefing form, and largely abandon the initiative, which civil libertarians and constitutional law experts said was deeply troubling.

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"After a review, the department has decided to eliminate the use of the Demonstration Debriefing Form," Michael O'Looney, the department's chief spokesman, said in a statement. "Arrestees will no longer be asked questions pertaining to prior demonstration history, or school name. All information gathered since the form's inception on Feb. 15 has been destroyed."

Several constitutional scholars and civil libertarians said that the practice raised grave questions about whether asking people about their political affiliations or activity would have a severe chilling effect on protest and speech that are protected by the First Amendment.

Central to the practice was the debriefing form, which detectives used to record where the arrested protesters went to school, their membership in any organizations and their involvement in past protests.

Mr. O'Looney said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and his deputy commissioner for intelligence, David Cohen, a former top Central Intelligence Agency official, did not know the debriefing form was in use. Mr. Cohen oversees the Intelligence Division detectives who conducted the questioning sessions at 1 Police Plaza as the protesters waited for their arrests to be processed.

"When it was brought to their attention," Mr. O'Looney said, "they took a look at it, decided some of those questions were not critical to our needs and decided to end its use."

He would not comment on the constitutional issues raised by the questions or say who had developed the form. Mr. O'Looney said that no disciplinary action was being contemplated against those responsible for developing the practice.

The police practice came to light after the New York Civil Liberties Union, which had notified protest organizers that it was seeking reports of possible police abuse or interference at the city's first large antiwar protest on Feb. 15, received hundreds of e-mail messages, said Christopher Dunn, the group's associate legal director. More than a dozen of the messages included accounts of arrested demonstrators' being questioned about their political activity, Mr. Dunn said.

The group later obtained a copy of the debriefing form from lawyers who had sought to represent some of the demonstrators taken to 1 Police Plaza for questioning after protests on Feb. 15 and March 22, Mr. Dunn said. Those lawyers were in most cases denied access to the arrested protesters, raising additional concerns about the protesters' right to counsel, Mr. Dunn said.

The Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to Mr. Kelly on Tuesday complaining that the information sought during the questioning was constitutionally protected, and called on him to halt the practice. The letter cited the group's concern that the department had "embarked upon a concerted campaign to collect information about lawful First Amendment activity" and was "using the coercive environment of an arrest interrogation to obtain that information outside the presence of counsel."

Yesterday, after a reporter inquired about the questioning and the commissioner's response to the letter, Mr. O'Looney said Mr. Kelly had halted the practice, but would not elaborate on how it had begun.

Mr. O'Looney said that the department would continue to ask arrested protesters what groups they were affiliated with and would retain the information in the form of a tally, but not with individuals' names. He said that knowing how many people had been arrested from particular groups would help the department assign the right number of officers to future protests by the same groups.