COPS Office Anti-Heroin Task Force (AHTF)

Program—How Decisions were Made to Allocate 

Approximately $6 Million Available When More 

than $13 Million was Requested

The COPS Office received applications from 15 eligible state law enforcement agencies requesting 

$13,746,621 in federal funding for the FY 2015 COPS Office Anti-Heroin Task Force (AHTF) program. 

The COPS Office developed an application to meet the 

requirements of the law

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

a focus 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 with applicants 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. 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 accurately and 

consistently reported seizure data. 

The COPS Office developed a uniform system of 

evaluating the information that applicants submitted

Comprehensive Review

The 15 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 problems, as indicated through the following sources of state-wide data:

• Primary treatment admissions for heroin

• Primary treatment admissions for other opioids

State primary admissions data for all applicants was scored and ranked within their respective 

recommendation rating categories. At this time, because of funding availability, applicants that received 

“Recommended” and “Not Recommended” ratings were removed from further consideration. A 

methodology for scoring was established to analyze and rank the seizure data provided in each 

application. Each category is of equal value, and the data was scored based on the rate of change 

between each year and the most recent year's data. Below is a classification of each item that was 

scored:

• Primary admissions data for the past three years 

• Rates per 100,000 population of primary treatment admissions for heroin for the past three 

years

• Rates per 100,000 population of primary treatment admissions for other opioids for the past 

three years

• Percent change in primary treatment admissions rates across three years 

• Percent change in primary treatment admissions for heroin rates across three years 

• Percent change in primary treatment admissions for other opioids rates across three years