New York City officials are keeping secret the names of tens of thousands of retirees who get pensions from the city, a step that breaks with decades of tradition and has outraged advocates of open government.

Several city pension funds, including those that pay retired police officers, have stopped releasing the names of some or all of their pensioners. The names of retired city employees, when linked to pension amounts, were in the past analyzed by policy groups and news organizations seeking to detect potential pension abuses or to understand the growth of pension spending.

“Holding back the names like this, in our view, is a violation of both the letter and spirit of the Freedom of Information Law,” said Tim Hoefer, director of the Empire Center, a research organization that analyzes pension spending. “Taxpayers are entitled to know where all of their tax dollars are going, and you can’t get that picture if some of the information is taken out.”

The trustees of the largest of the five city pension funds, the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, approved a series of measures last month that the city comptroller, John C. Liu, said would “provide the public with unprecedented access to information concerning the pension system.”

But one of those measures would allow the fund to black out the names of retirees who did law-enforcement-related work, including probation officers and correction officers, in accordance with a plan developed by the pension system staff.

Alan van Capelle, a spokesman for Mr. Liu, said in a statement that the pension fund board “has embraced a multitude of transparency initiatives, setting an example for other large pension systems nationwide.” He added, “Transparency is not stagnant, and there is always room to build on our progress.”….

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