What you need to know about 2015 police grants

The United States Bureau of Justice has posted its request for funding priorities for 2015. This request includes both discretionary ($1.5 billion) and mandatory (formula $891 million) funded programs. 

Police Departments seeking grant funding in 2015 should review the posted budget in detail to determine whether their strategic plan lines up with the programs intended for funding next year.  

Here is a breakdown: 

1.    COPS Hiring Program: An increase of $67 million for a total of $247 million will be offered. A total of $15 million will be available for community policing activities and $10 million for COPS Collaborative Reform Model of technical assistance to law enforcement agencies with significant law enforcement related enforcement activities. More details will be available with the publication of funding announcements. 

2.    Byrne Competitive Grant: This discretionary grant program will provide $15 Million (and increase in $1.5 million) for the implementation of evidence-based and data-driven strategies on issues of national significance as well as build state, local and tribal capacity for criminal justice planning and program development.

3.    Byrne Incentive Grant: This program will provide $15 million for a new program that will make supplemental incentive awards to state and local Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program grantees who choose to use a portion of their JAG Funding to support  strategies, activities and interventions that have strong evidence base or are promising practices.

4.    Cybercrime and Intellectual Property Enforcement: An additional $5 million is requested for this program, for a total of $15 million to provide grants, training, and technical assistance to support efforts to combat economic, high-technology, and internet crimes, including the intellectual property crimes of counterfeiting and piracy.

Additional funding will be provided by the Department of Justice in the areas of the Office of Violence Against Women, the indigent defense fund initiative, an evaluation clearing house, HOPE Opportunity Probation Nationwide Program, a forensics initiative, Residential Substance Abuse Treatment, Problem Solving Justice Program, Civil Legal Aid, Procedural Justice, Second Chance Act, Delinquency Prevention Program, National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention, to name a few. 

Greater detail about these program requests maybe found at www.bja.gov.

A new State-by-State Fact Sheet resource from the BJA concerning grant-funded programs and program highlights as well as state data and statistics is available here.

Click on your state and you will find a full summary of your state’s grant assistance and how the money was recently invested in your state. This information can be beneficial to your department now while you are still in the planning stages for funding needs in 2015. These reports also identify what types of investments were made with the grant money. It is important to use these types of resources to develop your annual strategic plan for your agency as well as identify 2015 funding gaps for which grants funds will be sought.

Please Note: The federal government has not yet approved the 2015 annual budget. All of these grant programs are subject to the Congressional and Presidential approval of the budget.