Police salaries, including fringe benefits, were estimated at $22 per hour, based on census data for salaries and a survey of fringe benefit rates in police departments (Miller and Luchter, 1988). To account for officer, supervisory, and support personnel administrative time, the average time spent on a case was inflated by a factor of 1.5. Although some percentage of police time spent on crime investigation is likely to be overtime, due to lack of data we were unable to account for this expense.

The police response estimates do not include all possible police costs associated with victim injury. For example, the cost of injury incurred by police officers during investigation of incidents of violent behavior is not reflected here.²⁷

Table 11 presents estimates of emergency ambulance costs, disaggregated by crime and distributed across all victims: $6 for rape, $4 for robbery, and $2 for assault. Because no data were available on the frequency of other modes of emergency transportation (such as helicopters), they are not included here. Although NCS includes information on the number of victims requiring hospital treatment, no data on mode of transportation are included. Absent better data, we assume that all individuals who were admitted as hospital inpatients had been transported by ambulance and that no individuals who were treated as outpatients received emergency transportation. Although in reality some victims treated