The gorilla's days are numbered.

Dusty and dog-eared, the 3-foot stuffed ape sits in a locked warehouse in the basement of the Baltimore Police Department. The big Magilla should have been sold last June, along with other abandoned property the department routinely auctions off to clear the cluttered shelves of its evidence control section.

But the police apparently thought it wasn't worth the effort, so the monkey sits destined for a trash bin big enough to hold it. And for now, the gorilla remains a fitting reminder of the primal way the city police collect, store and keep track of the thousands of pieces of evidence of Baltimore's crimes that come their way each month.

The property section was among the areas that Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke suggested last week would benefit from a "dramatic upgrading" of the department's technology. Currently, the police must catalog and track crime-scene evidence and other lost and found property that comes to them at a rate of more than 120 submissions per day -- 47,276 last year -- and they must do it all by hand.

Concerned by a public perception that Baltimore is unsafe, Mr. Schmoke said he wanted to step up the city's crime-fighting efforts. Improving the Police Department's technology is part of that plan, although the mayor concedes the city on its own could not afford to pay for the improvements. If additional funding could be found, the city would have a myriad of choices at a range of costs.

For example, police in St. Petersburg, Fla., use lap-top computers to write reports. In Suffolk County, N.Y., a computer can tell police in seconds how many .22-caliber, semiautomatic handguns are stored in their property room.

And in Dallas, the patrol cars are equipped with cellular telephones.

"Certainly, there is a very significant move toward automation by law enforcement throughout the nation," said David J. Roberts, deputy director of SEARCH Group Inc., a California-based consortium that researches new technologies used by police. "Recent developments in microcomputers and the ability to link those computers to state and national databases have enabled even the smallest police department to automate."

Despite Mayor Schmoke's concerns that some Baltimore police technology is antiquated and not up to the standards of a big-city police department, the city police possess two key law enforcement technological tools -- a computer-assisted dispatch system and an automated fingerprint identification system -- that are easily state-of-the-art.

The dispatch system allows police to identify automatically the address from which a 911 call is being made, to dispatch the nearest car quickly and to alert the officer to any previous problems there. The fingerprint system can search through a library of fingerprints and give police a list of possible suspects based on a set of prints that has been fed into the computer.

"Computers do in a fraction of seconds what humans would do" in hours, said Harwood W. Burritt, deputy city police commissioner and head of the department's information management bureau.

"Law enforcement is big business, and when it comes to information technology, we receive the same benefits that big business does when they automate, and it puts us in a [better] position to deliver services to the public and maybe with less people," he said.

In the past two years, the city Police Department also has upgraded the computer-generated equipment that identifies the quality and purity of drugs seized by detectives. The machinery that has reduced from two weeks to about two days the time it takes to analyze such evidence, said Thomas M. Muller, who works in the department's crime lab. A special electron microscope that analyzes tiny paint chips or fibers also was purchased, he said.

The city's technological capability to match fingerprints of suspects with those of known criminals will be increased significantly in June when the state's enhanced $14.2-million fingerprint identification system comes on line. Police in the city and Baltimore, Howard, Anne Arundel, Prince George's and Montgomery counties will have special terminals in their departments that will give them access to the state's fingerprint file for about 700,000 criminals. The service will cost them nothing.

If Baltimore officials want to inspect other advanced technologies, they only need go as far as the Towson headquarters of Baltimore County police.

The county served as the test site for a special computer that can suggest possible burglary suspects based on crime-scene information and other evidence. The system, which can cost between $25,000 to $50,000, is now being used in four other cities across the country.

"The computer takes expert knowledge on burglaries that resides in a detective's head, puts it in the computer and stores it as a set of rules," said Joan Jacoby, director of the Washington-based Jefferson Institute for Justice Studies, which funded the original program. "The detectives can be reassigned, promoted or die, but their knowledge can be preserved forever. If there is a residential burglary, the crime lab technician fills out a form which gets fed to the computer, and the computer generates a behavioral fingerprint of the suspect."

The big job that awaits anyone trying to update the city Police Department is the unglamorous, subterranean, but essential property room -- home not only to the stuffed gorilla but hundreds of stolen or lost bicycles, baseball bats, hubcaps, umbrellas, stolen stereos and televisions and broken safes.

In an evidence collection unit, computerizing the inventory won't put an end to the paperwork that is critical to the integrity of a piece of evidence. But it can increase the efficiency of storing and disposing of the items.

In Baltimore, where submissions to the Police Department's evidence control unit have increased by almost 30 percent since 1978, the task seems gargantuan. The property room is in fact a series of rooms in the basement of police headquarters on East Fayette Street. Entry is through a locked, metal grill.

The warehouse sprawls across 25,000 square feet. It is divided by dozens of floor-to-ceiling shelves that are stocked with hundreds of sealed paper bags containing pieces of evidence from thousands of crime scenes. More paper bags clog the aisles, and even more evidence -- as well as the accompanying documents and records -- are filed in 69 cabinets that are scattered throughout the warehouse.

There are buckets of old police nightsticks and cardboard boxes filled with machetes; shopping carts holding lost or found license plates; racks of shotguns and assault weapons seized from crime scenes. Cash, narcotics and jewelry are locked in vaults.

A staff of 26 runs the 24-hour operation -- the same number of staff since 1978, when the number of annual submissions was a third smaller. Even if the city were to computerize the evidence inventory, it would be difficult to "capture the back load," said Col. Leon Tomlin, who heads the department's property division. "You'd have to start from day one."

Before the property division can dispose of an item, the officer who brought it has to certify that it is no longer needed in a case -- and getting officers to do that in a timely fashion is a problem faced by many police departments. In Suffolk County, N.Y., where police have computerized their inventory since 1988, a special panel was convened last year to review submissions that were 7 years old. Of 12,000 cases they reviewed, they cleared 9,000.

In Baltimore, the property division disposes of an average of 54.6 submissions a day -- about half of what it takes in, the police said. Its primary function, according to Capt. John C. Peach, is to store evidence items "with integrity."

Considering the volume of submissions, the disposal of an abandoned piece of property that has little or no value -- like a stuffed gorilla -- can be a low priority.

Snared in a drug raid in 1987, the toy was logged in with a variety of items taken from an East Baltimore row house. Last year, city lawyers said the items seized in the raid could be disposed of because the criminal case had been concluded.

But the owner of the row house -- and presumably the gorilla's keeper -- had never been found or arrested. The gorilla became abandoned property.

"Eventually, sooner or later, it will get trashed," said Captain Peach, chief of the evidence control section.