The U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services announces a competitive solicitation for applications for the COPS Office FY 2023 COPS Hiring Program (CHP).
Donor Name: Community Oriented Policing Services
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 05/04/2023
Size of the Grant: $6,250,000
Grant Duration: 60 months
Details:
This program furthers the COPS Office’s goal of advancing public safety through community policing by funding additional full- time career law enforcement positions to meet law enforcement agencies’ community policing strategies.
The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) is the component of the U.S. Department of Justice responsible for advancing the practice of community policing by the nation’s state, local, territorial, and tribal law enforcement agencies through information and grant resources. The COPS Office has been appropriated more than $20 billion to advance community policing, including grants awarded to more than 13,000 state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies to fund the hiring and redeployment of more than 136,000 officers. COPS Office information resources, covering a wide range of community policing topics such as school and campus safety, violent crime, and officer safety and wellness.
Community policing is a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies that support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as nonviolent crime, violent crime, and fear of crime.
Goal
The goal of the COPS Hiring Program (CHP) is to provide funding directly to law enforcement agencies to hire and/or rehire additional career law enforcement officers in an effort to increase their community policing capacity and crime prevention efforts.
Funding Information
- Estimated Total Funding Amount: $224,500,000
- Maximum Funding Amount: $6,250,000
- Period of Performance: 60 months
The COPS Office will fund as many positions as possible for successful applicants; however, the number of officer positions requested by an agency may be reduced based on the availability of funding and other programmatic considerations.
Funding under this program may be used for the following:
- Hire new officers, which includes filling existing officer vacancies that are no longer funded in your agency’s budget. These positions must be in addition to your current budgeted (funded) level of sworn officer positions, and the officers must be hired on or after the official award start date on the notice of award.
- Rehire officers laid off by any jurisdiction as a result of state, local, or Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) budget reductions. The rehired officers must be rehired on or after the official award start date on the notice of award. Documentation must be maintained showing the date(s) that the positions were laid off and rehired.
- Rehire officers who are (at the time of application) currently scheduled to be laid off by your jurisdiction on a specific future date as a result of state, local, or BIA budget reductions. Recipients will be required to continue funding the positions with local funding until the date(s) of the scheduled layoffs. The dates of the scheduled layoffs and the number of positions affected must be identified in the CHP application. The recipient may rehire the officers with CHP funding on or immediately after the date of the scheduled layoff. Unless required by a recipient jurisdiction, the agency is not required to formally complete the administrative steps associated with the layoff of the individual officers it is seeking to rehire so long as the agency can document that a final, approved budget decision was made to lay off those individual officers on the identified layoff date. Documentation must be maintained detailing the dates and reason(s) for the layoffs. Furthermore, agencies awarded will be required to maintain documentation that demonstrates that the scheduled layoffs are occurring for local economic reasons unrelated to the availability of CHP award funds; such documentation may include local council meeting minutes, memoranda, notices, or orders discussing the layoffs, budget documents ordering jurisdiction-wide budget reductions, and/or notices provided to the individual officers regarding the layoffs.
An applicant may request funding in one or more of the above-referenced hiring categories under CHP. If an application is approved for funding, the notice of award will specify the number of positions approved in each category. Once awarded, recipient agencies may not move funded positions between the hiring categories without receiving written prior approval from the COPS Office.
An applicant may not reduce its existing current fiscal year budget for sworn officers just to make use of the CHP award. Any budget cut must be unrelated to the receipt of CHP award funds to avoid a violation of the COPS Office statutory non supplanting requirement.
The COPS Office is committed to advancing work that promotes civil rights and racial equity, increases access to justice, supports crime victims and individuals impacted by the justice system, strengthens community safety and protects the public from crime and evolving threats, and builds trust between law enforcement and the community.
Eligible Applicants
- City or township governments, County governments,
- Native American tribal governments (Federally recognized),
- State governments
For more information, visit Grants.gov.
