Description
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 invested more than $14 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 134,000 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, can be downloaded via the COPS Office's home page, www.cops.usdoj.gov. 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. Anticipated outcomes of COPS Hiring Program awards include engagement in planned community partnerships, implementation of projects to analyze and assess problems, implementation of changes to personnel and agency management in support of community policing, and increased capacity of agency to engage in community policing activities. Applicants will be expected to describe their community policing strategy and request the number of newly hired and/or rehired full-time sworn career law enforcement officer positions necessary to support that strategy. COPS Office funding must be used to reorient the mission and activities of law enforcement agencies toward the community or enhance their involvement in community policing. 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. The Department of Justice is committed to advancing work that promotes civil rights, increases access to justice, supports crime victims, protects the public from crime and evolving threats, and builds trust between law enforcement and the community. Law enforcement plays a vital role in each of these areas, through developing and maintaining meaningful relationships with all segments of their communities, and working in partnership with those communities to provide effective crime prevention, intervention, and response services and resources. For all Fiscal Year 2021 COPS Office grant solicitations, applicants should consider these priorities when applying for COPS Office funding to advance community policing, and address these strategic planning priorities within their applications as applicable. FY 2021 CHP awards will cover up to 75 percent of the entry-level salary and fringe benefits for each approved position for a three year period, based on the applicant's current entry level salary levels for full-time officers. There is a minimum 25 percent local cash match (cost share) requirement, unless a waiver is approved. The maximum federal share per officer position is $125,000 over the three year period, unless a local match waiver is approved. Any additional costs for higher than entry-level salaries and fringe benefits will be the responsibility of the recipient agency. Funding under this program will support three years of officer or deputy salaries within a five year period of performance to accommodate time needed for recruitment and hiring. Agencies must retain each CHP-funded position for 12 months following the three years of funding for that position. The additional officer positions should be added to your agency's law enforcement budget with state and/or local funds over and above the number of locally-funded officer positions that would have existed in the absence of the award. Absorbing CHP-funded positions through attrition (rather than adding the extra positions to your budget with additional funding) does not meet the retention requirement. 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 to do 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 take advantage 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. Type of award This is a competitive, discretionary program. Statutory Authority This program is authorized under the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 as amended by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Title I, Part Q, Public Law 103-322, 34 U.S.C. § 10381 et seq.