The D.C. police department is in disarray, plagued by mismanagement, wasteful spending, lost evidence and blown cases, and has an unguarded property warehouse and drug lab piled high with guns and narcotics that are "vulnerable to direct attack," according to confidential consultants' reports obtained by The Washington Post.

The reports, prepared for the department, found appalling conditions in the police evidence warehouse. An officer was critically injured last year, for example, when he accidentally spilled the hallucinogenic drug PCP on himself while trying to maneuver in a crowded work space. And medical evidence from rape victims routinely spoiled in the 110-degree heat of a storage area, creating a "biohazard."

Narcotics and guns are stored in a "ready-made shack" about 50 feet from open bay doors at the warehouse. According to the reports, there is "absolutely no security force" on the premises at night, only alarms and motion detectors.

Officers and civilians steal gasoline from police fuel pumps, even breaking locks to get at it, police officials said yesterday. Officials cannot find 7 percent of the cars assigned to the department's seven district stations. Many felony cases are dismissed because computers crash and evidence is lost.

The consultants also found that the department is plagued by poor personnel deployment. Officers who might have been fighting crime instead were assigned to low-level chores -- a lieutenant working in a mail room, two officers laboring as file clerks, another officer in the administrative folders section and another in the photo gallery division.

The reports, by consulting firm Booz-Allen & Hamilton Inc., recommended taking 157 officers out of a few administrative divisions and placing them on street patrols within 10 months.

The D.C. financial control board and D.C. Police Chief Larry D. Soulsby repeatedly refused to release the reports, which were prepared by Booz-Allen under a $5 million contract with the control board. But control board Vice Chairman Stephen D. Harlan, who has overseen reforms at the police department, spoke yesterday of the problems identified in the reports.

"The culture of city government, not just the police department, had been allowed to disintegrate to a very, very low level," Harlan said. "The management of various [police] departments -- technology, fleet, warehouse -- is in a great state of disrepair. There is a sense of almost being overwhelmed."

He added: "When you don't have controls, you have an opportunity for severe mischief. If someone has misappropriated drugs, cash and property, we honestly wouldn't know."

Booz-Allen is still working on a report on the police department's troubled homicide unit. But after being briefed on the unit's dismal case-closure rate and other problems, Soulsby last month purged its leadership, transferring the unit's commander and 17 supervisors.

Forty-nine homicide detectives -- nearly half the unit's personnel -- have not closed a case this year, and the Justice Department has identified more than 100 homicide cases from 1991 to 1994 that could have been solved quickly but for basic failures in police work. Last week, Soulsby announced that 22 federal agents would join city detectives in attempting to solve those old cases.

The police department has made some progress. Violent crime has dropped 18 percent in the last year, since the department concentrated the deployment of officers in high-crime areas.

But the Booz-Allen reports obtained by The Post found that mismanagement and antiquated record-keeping continue to plague improvement efforts. These are among the findings:

Much of the evidence in storage is more than 10 years old and misclassified. Booz-Allen recommended getting rid of 96 percent of it.

Department efforts to fight crimes committed against juveniles is plagued by mismanagement. Three different police units investigate abuse and neglect of children, sex offenses and pedophilia. Each unit fails to share basic information with the others.

There is "no ability to account for usage" of police vehicles and fuel.

Fifty-eight officers are assigned to monitoring prisoners. Booz-Allen concluded that all of the officers could be replaced by civilians and reassigned to street patrols.

Twenty-six full-time police employees spend all their working time -- 52,000 labor hours a year -- transporting prisoners from the point of arrest to district stations, taking prisoners to the central cellblock at police headquarters and transporting them to court. Consultants suggest cutting the number of work hours by 60 percent.

The police department pays far more than the market rate for leases on three buildings.

Soulsby did not dispute most of the consultants' findings and embraced most of the recommended improvements.

"We're changing the culture," Soulsby said. "We are changing every unit. These are things that have been wrong for 20 years. They didn't occur overnight."

But other critics, including members of the D.C. Council and Congress, said that Soulsby, who has been chief for two years, ought to be held accountable for the department's failings. They contend that the problems are too deep for Soulsby to make a plausible claim of ignorance.

Booz-Allen's reports credit the department for "embracing reform" but warn that there "is a long way to go." The firm recommends wiping out several units -- including a group of officers assigned to organize community activities -- and cutting the number of canine squads in half, to 24.

The reports estimated that it would cost $74 million to make the department function efficiently.

Buildings are in particularly bad shape. The consultants found broken heating and cooling systems, filthy cellblocks, inadequate ventilation that "endangers the health of officers" and violations of basic health and safety laws, including the failure to inspect and replace fire extinguishers.

The consultants placed the building repair tab at $7 million.

Booz-Allen also found dozens of lost opportunities for savings. For instance, the police department stores more than $3 million in seized cash in a vault; the consultants recommend putting at least $1.7 million of that in a savings account and reaping about $102,000 a year in interest.

The department also spends 42 cents in administrative costs for every dollar it takes in on auctions of forfeited property. Consultants say the department should cut its costs in half and auction far more property.

Booz-Allen also found example after example of wasted time and cumbersome bureaucratic procedures.

The consultants, for example, said the department could streamline its warehouse operations -- including cutting staff by 60 percent and redeploying police officers -- and save a total of 500 work hours a year, which amounts to four weeks' worth of labor.

In the stolen-property records division, the consultants found that three employees are paid to process 150 items a day. The consultants estimated that, among the employees, 11.5 labor hours are wasted every day complying with archaic work rules. In another paperwork unit, the consultants said that eight employees waste approximately one-third of their workday on unnecessary labor.

Then there is the criminal history unit, where eight employees waste about 30 hours a day, according to the consultants.

If the department straightens out those administrative units, and redeploys officers to the streets, the savings could run into the millions of dollars, the consultants found.

Cost-effective repair and upkeep of cars and safe driving are no less a challenge for the department. Every aspect of the operation is plagued by problems, and, overall, the department spends twice as much per capita as New York City and Montgomery County to operate and repair its police cars.

Many officers get into police-vehicle accidents, the reports said. In 1996, for example, officers were involved in about 195, totaling nearly $300,000 in damage.

The consultants said the department should cut the accident rate by 25 percent.

They suggested mandatory advanced driving courses and would demand that officers have clean driving records before they are allowed to continue driving police cars or trucks.

Cars spend far too long in repair shops after accidents, the reports found. For every 1.5 hours of police work time, there are 66.5 hours of waiting time for vehicle repairs and 35.4 hours of waiting for preventive maintenance.

And the department suffers from a lack of experienced mechanics. Few mechanics are certified, and many cannot pass basic manufacturer-provided training courses. The report found poor repairs, faulty checklists and several examples of car engines seizing because oil was listed as full when, in fact, there was none.

The police department has difficulty firing mechanics, apparently because of cumbersome city and union labor rules.

The consultants also noted that 40 percent of the department's motorcycles are not being used because of backlogged repairs and because "officers are not licensed" to drive them.

Those vehicle problems arise, in part, from a single cause, the reports said: There are 20 police officers and 47 civilians on the fleet maintenance staff, but no one is formally in charge. Perhaps as a result, the reports note, the division is overstaffed and yet runs up excessive employee overtime pay.

Fixing these problems won't be easy. The department has 1,243 cars. The average car is more than five years old. The book value of the cars is $5.4 million -- but the replacement value exceeds $24 million.

There is also the question of responding to accusations of police brutality and misbehavior. Booz-Allen noted that the current civilian complaint system is cumbersome, fails to protect the confidentiality of citizens and gives rise to fears of retaliation.

It is a system, Booz-Allen noted, that is rife with "potential conflict of interest," because civilian complaints are investigated by the department, not an independent group.

Booz-Allen favors hiring an outside agency to carry out such investigations.

Booz-Allen recommended requiring bachelor's degrees for all candidates for the rank of police captain and above. At present, Soulsby and many high-ranking officers do not have college diplomas. (The report recommended grandfathering all present officers.)

Soulsby, who has served in many top positions in the department, including head of the homicide unit, noted that many of the problems are long-standing and that managers have lacked training and commitment. And he noted that some of the problems are beyond the department's control.

For instance, he said, the U.S. attorney's office insists that the property warehouse not dispose of contraband drugs and money. And, according to the reports, there are 70 impounded junk vehicles sitting on police lots because the D.C. Department of Public Works has not given out a salvage contract to tow them away.

"A long time ago, I gave up being a popular chief," Soulsby said. "The next chief can worry about being a popular chief after we turn all of this around."

Harlan, the control board vice chairman, who said he prides himself on a "no excuses" policy, said the bottom line is "buckling down and getting to the root of these huge problems. We just have a huge task."