COPS Office Anti-Heroin Task Force (AHTF)

Program—How Decisions were Made to Allocate 

Approximately $5.7 Million When More than $20

Million was Requested

The COPS Office received applications from 19 eligible state law enforcement agencies requesting 

$20,127,953 in federal funding for the FY 2016 COPS Office Anti-Heroin Task Force (AHTF) program. 

The COPS Office developed an application to meet the 

requirements of the law

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

year, 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 19 eligible applications underwent a comprehensive review process by specialists and external 

heroin and other opioid subject matter expert (SME) peer reviewers. 

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

Recommended," "Recommended," or "Not Recommended" for each proposal. From the 

recommendations, seven agencies ranked within the "Highly Recommended" rating, and three agencies 

ranked within the "Recommended" rating; five agencies were ranked within the “Not Recommended” 

rating.
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.