New numbers showing that the police department has been stopping and frisking civilians — the majority of them minorities — at an increased clip in recent months could fuel anger at protests and “pray-ins” planned around the city tomorrow in response to the verdict in the Sean Bell trial.

The number of people stopped by police in the first quarter of 2008 rose by more than 35,000 versus the last quarter of 2007, to 145,098, new statistics released to the City Council by the police department show.

The associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Christopher Dunn, who monitors the stop-and-frisk data, said the number of stops was the largest he’s ever seen for a single quarter.

“There’s a lot of anger right now in the wake of the Bell verdict about racial profiling, and these numbers are just going to inflame that,” Mr. Dunn said, adding: “What affects most black New Yorkers are not police shootings, but stop and frisks.”

Council Member Peter Vallone said he was surprised at the rise in stops at a time when the department is under increased scrutiny following the Bell shooting.

“You’d think they’d back off,” he said, although he didn’t criticize the department’s methods of stopping and frisking civilians.

The percentage of minorities among those stopped — 82% — was the same for both quarters. Critics of the police department have argued that blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately stopped, but police officials have defended the high proportion of minorities stopped by saying that they are more likely to be named as suspects in crimes.

“The data indicates no racial bias in the stops, but it does show a relationship between the percentage of individuals stopped and the descriptions of suspects,” a spokesman for the police department, Assistant Chief Michael Collins, said in a statement in which he also cited a recent study by the Rand Corp., a think tank, that found no racial bias in police stop-and-frisk practices.

The Reverend Al Sharpton, who has organized tomorrow’s protests against the acquittal of three detectives who killed Bell on his wedding day, said he would be addressing the rise in stop and frisks in the days to come. The protests include a series of pray-ins scheduled for six spots around the city, including police headquarters, that he says will lead to civil disobedience arrests and larger protests in the coming weeks.

New data about civilians shot by police released yesterday showed the number of shootings decreased slightly between 2001 and 2006, even as the number of bullets fired by police increased. The numbers also showed that a large majority of shooting victims appear not to have fired back at police. In 2006, 13 of the 125 shootings were classified as “gunfights,” in which civilians fired weapons.

“That raises serious questions about whether police are unnecessarily firing,” Mr. Dunn said.

A statement released by the department noted that the police department had the lowest rate of fatal shootings per 1,000 officers among the country’s largest police departments.

City Council members and the New York Civil Liberties Union are pushing for the police to resume releasing demographic data about police shooting victims, which the department last did in the late 1990s. Police have so far declined to release data on the race, gender, or age of the shooting victims.

“We know more about the breed of dogs that have been shot than the type of people that have been shot,” Mr. Vallone said, referring to the police department’s decision to begin reporting on the breed of dogs shot by police each year at around the same time it stopped releasing demographic data about human victims.