If approved by the Legislature, Romney's 2004 budget would allocate $840,000 to track information on the race and gender of millions of drivers who receive traffic warnings, Public Safety Secretary Edward A. Flynn said yesterday. Last fall, Acting Governor Jane Swift slashed the remaining 2003 budget for studying racial profiling by 98 percent -- from $346,663 to $5,750.

Following a national furor over allegations of racial discrimination by police, lawmakers in 2000 approved a bill ordering the Registry of Motor Vehicles to track all tickets and warnings written by police officers across the state and to submit the data to a university for analysis. The Registry has typed ticket information into a database, but it stopped typing in information about warnings in 2001 -- making it impossible to determine whether police officers, who have wide discretion, favor whites over minorities in writing warnings instead of tickets.

The proposed funding is not retroactive, so researchers from Northeastern University studying the data for the state will have two years of tickets but only two months of warnings for comparison. The Northeastern study had been expected next month, but may be delayed because the Registry has yet to provide researchers with the database.

A Globe study published in January found a wide racial disparity in ticketing motorists and searching their vehicles. Out of 750,000 traffic tickets issued statewide, black and Hispanic drivers were ticketed at twice their share of the population. Once ticketed, they were 50 percent more likely than whites to have their cars searched -- even though more of the whites searched were found to have drugs.

Under the state law, it's Flynn's responsibility to decide whether racial disparities in a particular police department rise to a level that warrants scrutiny. The law allows Flynn, with Attorney General Tom Reilly, to force departments to collect more information on traffic stops. But the law does not call for penalties, other than the threat of legal action by the state and civil rights groups. Flynn said he created the task force to advise him on how to determine whether bias has occurred.

The task force -- with members from law enforcement, civil rights groups, and academia -- met on Monday. The meeting was largely introductory, but ''clearly, there was an undercurrent of what I would call disagreement,'' said member Albert P. Cardarelli, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Cardarelli said he was encouraged by the group's diversity and commitment. But, he said, ''The focus has to be to establish some kind of measure . . . or benchmark of what racial profiling is, and what kind of data indicates a locality has gone beyond some reasonable boundary of it. I think there is going to be a lot of disagreement over that, on an issue that is so profoundly emotional.''

Setting a benchmark shouldn't be the only mandate, said member Carol Rose, executive director of the state American Civil Liberties Union. ''We have to start thinking about how to begin to address profiling,'' she said, ''. . . not merely to set the standard of how much racial profiling is too much.''