Yes, Small Police Departments Win Grant Money

It is not uncommon for police departments to call or email me before they register for my Law Enforcement Grant Writing 101 training and ask whether their small department can realistically bring home grant money. There seems to be a common misconception that if a department is small, they are unlikely to win grant awards. This is simply not true. In this September edition of our newsletter, I'll debunk this myth. I've pulled data on police agencies who won the COPS Hiring Program Grant award in 2022, and I will show you that small police departments make up a significant chunk of awardees.

COPS Hiring Program Grant Background

I have written about the COPS hiring grant before, but for those unfamiliar with this opportunity, the Office of Community-Oriented Policing releases this notice of availability of funds each year, usually in early March, and it is usually due in early May. The COPS office will cover up to 75% of entry level officer salary and fringe (up to $125,000 over three years). This requires your agency to cover the other 25%, but there is also an option to apply for a waiver if there is a compelling case for why the match requirement should be waived. Applicants are required to develop a community policing strategy/plan for how the officers will be utilized, and there are several award categories to which departments can apply. Since the grant requirements are pretty similar year-to-year, you can have a look at this years announcement to get an idea of the requirements if you have an interest in applying in 2024.

2022 COPS Hiring Grant Awards

The COPS office hasn't released the 2023 recipient list yet, so we have to look back to 2022 to break down awardees by the size of their departments. In 2022, the COPS office awarded 180 police agencies funding to hire sworn personnel. in total, $139,671,369 was allocated and used to hire 973 officers across the United States. You can take a look at the award list to see what agencies received funding, how much they received, and how many officers they hired.

Did Small Departments Receive Funding?

In addition to using the award list data, I was able to collect data on 117 of the 180 departments that won an award from the 2019 UCR Police Employee database. Using 2019 data isn't perfect, and there may be some differences between 2022 and 2019 in terms of staffing levels and populations served, but these differences don't effect the overall findings in a substantive way.

The 117 departments included here received $106,602,075 and hired 720 officers, which accounts for 76% of the overall grant funds that were awarded, and 74% of the officers that were hired as part of the grant program. I excluded departments that were not a state within the United States, such as Puerto Rico and Guam, and departments that did not report employee data to the UCR in 2019.

I think it is worthwhile first to explore where the myth that small police departments don't win grant awards may stem from in part. It is true that large departments bring home a larger share of the overall dollar amounts that are awarded. As shown in figure 1, departments that had over 500 sworn officers were awarded nearly $48 Million, which is 45% of the grant awards that were made overall. I calculated a Pearson Correlation with the total number of sworn officers in a department, and the amount of funding that they received, and found a moderately strong positive relationship (r=0.599). In other words, departments that had a larger workforce tended to receive more funding to hire.

This makes sense given that the number of officers that you can request as part of the COPS hiring program is dependent of the size of your department overall. So, yes, we can say that large departments bring home a large chunk of grant funds. I think this contributes to the incorrect assumption that small departments don't win grants.

Now for the good news if you are a smaller agency. As shown in figure 2, most of the departments that won an award had fewer than 100 officers. In fact, departments that had fewer than 100 officers accounted for 73% of the agencies that received awards, and very small departments with fewer than 25 officers made up 37% of the awardees.

Digging a litter deeper, departments that won a COPS Hiring Program grant award had a median sworn force of just 39 officers, and the median population served was a modest 19,694 residents. Most COPS hiring grant awards are used to hire only a few officers and they are relatively small dollar amounts. The median award amount was $375,000 and the median number of officers hired was three.

In 2022 the COPS Office funded about 25% of the applications for the Hiring Program that they received. A 1 in 4 chance of winning an award isn't a bad place to start relative to other grants. So if your department needs personnel, this opportunity is worth applying to regardless of how large or small your agency is.

The Take Away

It is true that larger police agencies bring home a large chunk of grant funding. This likely helps to perpetuate the myth that small departments can't win grants. However, the fact of the matter is that small agencies make up the largest percentage of awardees overall for this particular grant. Although the award amounts are smaller for smaller agencies, which makes sense, the data presented debunks the myth that small departments don't win grant awards.

Departments in places like Lewisville, Arkansas, Gore, Oklahoma, East Jordan Michigan, and Mead Colorado, all had force sizes that were fewer than 10 sworn, and yet they were awarded funding to hire one or two more officers. Although the amount of money awarded to these departments is quite small relative to the $8M that my former department, the NYPD, received, an additional officer in a force of three sworn can improve police services in these jurisdictions considerably. So if your department is not applying to the COPS Hiring Program and other funding opportunities because you think your small department won't win one, think again.