COPS Hiring Program

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".