COPS HIRING PROGRAM – HOW DECISIONS WERE MADE 

TO ALLOCATE THE $127 MILLION WHEN MORE THAN $974

MILLION WAS REQUESTED

The CHP solicitation opened on April 22, 2013, and all applications were originally required to be 

submitted by May 22, 2013. However, due to an outage of the on-line application system, the 

submission deadline was extended until June 4, 2013.

Ultimately, the COPS Office received applications from 1,718 law enforcement agencies requesting 

4,427 officer positions, for $974,007,306 in federal funding. 

The COPS Office focused on three priority areas for additional consideration

Military Veterans

Under FY 2013 CHP, new hire officer positions are not required to be military veterans, as under 

FY 2012 CHP. However, as the COPS Office supports the Attorney General’s commitment to 

hiring military veterans whenever possible, applicants who committed to hiring or rehiring at least 

one military veteran under CHP received additional consideration for FY 2013 CHP funding. As in 

FY 2012, a military veteran hire must have served on active duty for a period of at least 180 

consecutive days, any part of which occurred on or after September 11, 2001. In FY 2013, 152 

agencies received funding with a commitment to hire or rehire at least one military veteran using 

CHP funding, for a total of 336 veterans.

School Resource Officers

Applicants who requested officer positions in order to deploy school resource officers (SROs) were 

required to choose the “School Based Policing through School Resource Officers” community 

policing problem area in their 2013 CHP application and likewise received additional consideration 

for FY 2013 CHP funding. Agencies requesting multiple officer positions in order to deploy school 

resource officers must deploy all their funded officer positions as school resource officers. 

Moreover, CHP grantees that chose this specific community policing problem area will not be 

allowed to change it post-award. CHP grantees that use CHP funding to deploy SROs will also be 

required to submit to the COPS Office the contact information for each school partner where they 

intend to deploy the SROs, and to provide a Memorandum of Understanding between the CHP 

grantee and the school partner. In FY 2013, 144 agencies received funding for a total of 370 SRO 

positions.
Homicide and Gun Violence

The COPS Office supports the Attorney General’s priority goal of reducing violent crime, especially 

if gun related. Applicants who chose “Homicide” or “Gun Violence” as a problem area in their 

2013 CHP application received additional consideration for CHP funding. Moreover, grantees that 

chose either of these specific community policing problem areas will not be allowed to change the 

problem area post-award. In FY 2013, 48 funded agencies selected either “Homicide” or “Gun 

Violence” as their jurisdiction’s problem area, committing to hire 319 officers to address these

problems.

The COPS Office developed an application to meet the requirements of the law

The COPS Office developed an application for CHP funds that met the requirements of the statute 

and mission of the COPS Office to increase the ability of law enforcement to implement community 

policing strategies within the three primary elements of community policing: 1) problem-solving; 2) 

partnerships; and 3) organizational transformation. 

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 public finance to develop appropriate application 

questions. Applicants were asked to submit information on such indicators as:

• Reported crime for the previous three years

• Current commitment to community policing

• Planned community policing activities 

• Changes in budget for law enforcement agencies and revenues for local governments

• Poverty and unemployment rates. 

In asking a variety of fiscal health questions, the COPS Office focused on getting as complete a view 

as possible of the fiscal distress being experienced by applicants through objective and verifiable 

indicators that all agencies, from rural communities to large cities, could accurately report. 

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

problems that can be countered with effective responses. Applicants were asked to identify the 

specific community problem they wished to address with COPS funding. 

Community policing relies heavily on partnerships and relationships between law enforcement and 

the community it serves. A number of questions were designed to examine an agency’s formation of 

partnerships, such as working with other public agencies, private organizations, or participation in 

regional law enforcement partnerships. Agencies were asked to identify the number and types of 

partnerships they intended to initiate or enhance in order to address their identified problem. 
The COPS Office checked and double-checked, verifying the data applicants sent

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 reviewed more than 400 data 

points within each application. In some cases, the COPS Office contacted applicant agencies to 

verify information provided in their application. This data verification process, though timeconsuming, was crucial to ensuring that all applicants were properly evaluated based on accurate and 

reliable economic, crime, and community policing data. This process included checking against 

available reported data such as the Uniform Crime Statistics reported annually to the Federal Bureau 

of Investigation.

The COPS Office developed a uniform system of evaluating the information that applicants 

submitted

Selection Methodology

The COPS Office focused on balancing the applicant’s need for federal assistance (as measured by 

economic and fiscal health questions) with crime rates and the applicant’s current commitment to 

community policing and their proposed community policing plan. For FY 2013, an applicant’s 

commitment to community policing and the strength of their overall community policing plan were 

the basis for initial scoring. A minimum score was established for the community policing portion 

of the application. Forty-six agencies that did not meet the score were removed from further 

consideration.

For the remaining applicants, fiscal need comprised 20 percent, crime 30 percent, and community 

policing 50 percent of the overall score. Additionally, models similar to those used in FY 2011 and 

FY 2012 were used to determine the weight of the questions within each broad category. For 

example, within the 20 percent of the score allocated to the need for federal assistance, applicants 

were ranked on measures of recent economic conditions as well as those of systemic socioeconomic 

health. COPS Office staff followed up with applicants and reviewed publicly available data to 

ensure that the information was as error-free as possible before completing the ranking protocol.

Due to the high demand and limited funding available, only 263 of the 1,718 CHP requests were 

ultimately funded, which is only about 15% of the total number of agencies that submitted 

applications. 

In addition, two long-standing statutory requirements designed to ensure national distribution of 

COPS Office funding had an impact on which applications were ultimately funded. First, the COPS 

Office must distribute half of all hiring funds to agencies serving populations of more than 150,000 

and half to those of fewer than 150,000. Second, by law the COPS Office must ensure that at least 

1⁄2 of one percent of hiring funds ($627,455 for FY 2013) is allocated to each state or territory with 
eligible applicants. Although this ultimately means that sometimes a lower scoring applicant in one 

state receives funding ahead of a higher scoring applicant in another, this requirement helps ensure 

that smaller states and territories are not excluded from funding. 

Capping Methodology

All agencies’ requests were capped at no more than 5% of their current actual sworn force strength, 

up to a maximum of 15 officers (25 officers for jurisdictions serving more than one million).

However, to provide funding assistance to the largest number of eligible agencies, the COPS Office 

decided to further reduce the cap to 10 officers for agencies below one million in service population 

(15 for those serving more than one million).