Assistance program
COPS Hiring Program
$161.3 Million committed in FY2026–FY2026
- Agency
- Community Oriented Policing Service, Justice, Department of
- Assistance
- Not Applicable
- CFDA number
- 16.068
- What it does
- The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) is the component of the U.S. Department of Justice responsible for advancing the practice of community policing by the Nation’s state, local, territorial, and tribal law enforcement agencies through information and grant resources. Since inception, the COPS Office has been appropriated more than $20 billion to advance community policing, including grants awarded to more than 13,000 state, local, territorial, and tribal law enforcement agencies to fund the hiring and redeployment of more than 136,000 officers. COPS Office information resources, covering a wide range of community policing topics such as school and campus safety, violent crime, and officer safety and wellness, can be downloaded via the COPS Office’s home page, https://cops.usdoj.gov. The COPS Hiring Program (CHP) provides funding to law enforcement agencies to hire and/or rehire additional career law enforcement officers in an effort to increase their community policing capacity and crime prevention efforts. Anticipated outcomes of CHP awards include engagement in planned community partnerships, implementation of projects to analyze and assess problems, implementation of changes to personnel and agency management in support of community policing, and increased capacity of agency to engage in community policing activities necessary to prevent crime. Community policing is a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies that support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as violent crime, nonviolent crime, and fear of crime. To read an overview of the principles of community policing, please see the COPS Office publication, "Community Policing Defined".
- Who benefits
- Not Applicable
- Who applies
- Local, state, territorial, and tribal law enforcement agencies that have primary law enforcement authority are eligible to apply. An agency with primary law enforcement authority is defined as the first responder to calls for service for all types of criminal incidents within the jurisdiction served. Applicants must have a law enforcement agency (i.e. Sheriff’s Office, Department, etc.) that is operational by the close of this application or receive services through a new or existing contract for law enforcement services through an existing contract for law enforcement services or a new contract for law enforcement services that is in place by the close of this solicitation. Applicants must also maintain primary law enforcement authority for the population to be served. If funds under this program are to be used as part of a written contracting agreement for law enforcement services (e.g., a town that contracts with a neighboring sheriff’s department to receive services), the agency wishing to receive law enforcement services must be the legal applicant in this application. A law enforcement agency is established and operational if the jurisdiction has passed authorizing legislation and it has a current operating budget.
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments