COPS Office Anti-Heroin Task Force (AHTF) 

Program—How Decisions were Made to Allocate 

Approximately $27.8 Million When More than $33 

Million was Requested 

The COPS Office received applications from 21 eligible state law enforcement agencies; however, one 

agency withdrew its application, resulting in 20 applicants requesting $33,133,524 in federal funding for 

the FY 2018 COPS Office Anti-Heroin Task Force (AHTF) program. 

The COPS Office developed an application to meet the 

requirements of the law 

This is the fourth fiscal year that the COPS Office has received funding for AHTF. As in the previous fiscal 

years, AHTF focuses on advancing public safety by providing funds to investigate illicit activities related 

to the distribution of heroin or unlawful distribution of prescriptive opioids or unlawful heroin and 

prescription opioid traffickers through statewide collaboration. Only state law enforcement agencies 

authorized by law or by a state agency to engage in or supervise anti-heroin investigative activities were 

eligible to apply for funding. 

The COPS Office balanced scoring indicators 

To measure and compare the necessary scoring indicators, the COPS Office consulted with experts in the 

fields of policing, criminology, and drug control policy to develop appropriate application questions. 

Applicants were asked to submit information regarding their jurisdiction’s heroin problem on such 

indicators as 

•	 reported primary treatment admission rates for heroin and other opioids for the previous three 

years; 

•	 current anti-heroin investigative activities; 

•	 planned or current involvement in an anti-heroin task force. 

The community policing philosophy engages in a proactive and systematic examination of identified 

problems that can be countered with effective responses. Community policing relies heavily on 

partnerships and relationships between law enforcement and the community it serves. Narrative 

questions were designed to examine an agency’s formation of collaborations with federal, state, local, 

or tribal partners such as other law enforcement and public agencies, private organizations, or 

participation in multijurisdictional task forces. Agencies were asked to identify and describe the types of 

partnerships they intended to initiate or enhance in order to address their identified heroin problem. 
 

 

The COPS Office verified the data that was submitted 

The application system contains numerous built-in logic checks to help prevent the submission of 

erroneous data. In addition, once the applications were submitted, specialists in the COPS Office 

immediately reviewed the data contained therein. The COPS Office verified information provided in 

applications using data from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). This data verification 

process was crucial to ensuring that all applicants were properly evaluated based on accurately and 

consistently reported primary treatment admissions data. 

The COPS Office developed a uniform system of

evaluating the information that applicants submitted 

Comprehensive Review 

The 20 eligible applications underwent an exhaustive and comprehensive review process. 

The peer reviewers evaluated the following criteria in the Project Narrative and Budget Narrative 

sections of the application to determine the quality of each application. The reviewers looked at the 

following: 

• Problem identification 

• Current heroin and other opioid investigative activities 

• Anti-heroin task force participation 

• Collaboration and partnerships 

• High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area threat assessment with regard to heroin and other opioids 

• Strategy to achieve program goals 

• Applicable and allowable budget items requested 

The peer reviewers then developed recommendations based on a rating of "Highly Recommended," 

"Recommended," or "Not Recommended" for each proposal. From the recommendations, two agencies 

ranked within the "Highly Recommended" rating, and 16 agencies ranked within the "Recommended" 

rating; two agencies received the “Not Recommended” rating. 

Additional Consideration 

In FY 2018 the COPS Office provided additional consideration to state, local, and tribal applicants that 

certified their cooperation with federal law enforcement to address illegal immigration. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Data Scoring 

The focus for funding was on state-level law enforcement agencies in states with high rates of identified 

heroin and other opioid problems in the most recent available data, as indicated through the following 

sources of state-wide data: 

•	 Primary treatment admissions rates (per 100,000 population) for heroin 

•	 Primary treatment admissions rates (per 100,000 population) for other opioids 

A methodology for primary treatment admission rates for heroin and other opioids was established to 

analyze and rank the admissions data provided in each application (and verified through ONDCP). A 

median, using the data for the states in which applications were received, was determined using the per 

capita rate of the state's primary treatment admission data for heroin and other opioids. Applications 

were then ranked using the following criteria: 

1.	 Applications that received a “Highly Recommended” rating and had a per capita primary 

treatment admissions rate for heroin and other opioids at or above the median per capita rate 

for all applicants meeting the basic minimum requirements. 

2.	 Applicants that received a “Recommended” rating and had a per capita primary treatment 

admissions rate for heroin and other opioids at or above the median per capita rate for all 

applicants meeting the basic minimum requirements. 

3.	 Applicants that received a “Highly Recommended” rating and had a per capita primary 

treatment admissions rate for heroin and other opioids below the median per capita rate for all 

applicants meeting the basic minimum requirements. 

4.	 Applicants that received a “Recommended” rating and had a per capita primary treatment 

admissions rate for heroin and other opioids below the median per capita rate for all applicants 

meeting the basic minimum requirements.