FY23 Continuation and Expansion of Regional De-Escalation Training Centers - Community Policing Development Solicitation | O COPS 2023 171551

Opportunity Information: Apply for O COPS 2023 171551

The FY23 Continuation and Expansion of Regional De-Escalation Training Centers grant is a discretionary funding opportunity from the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office), offered under the Community Policing Development (CPD) program (CFDA 16.710). It is designed to strengthen the ability of law enforcement agencies to carry out community policing by investing in training and practical, field-ready guidance that can be adopted across agencies. The broader CPD purpose is to identify and expand promising practices, test and refine innovative strategies, and create resources that help agencies prevent crime, improve safety, and build trust with the communities they serve. The solicitation also reflects the COPS Office emphasis on civil rights and racial equity, increased access to justice, support for victims and justice-impacted individuals, and strategies that reinforce legitimacy and public confidence in policing.

At the center of this specific solicitation is the continued support and expansion of a network of regional de-escalation training centers. The idea is to make high-quality de-escalation education more widely available and more consistent across jurisdictions, especially in moments when public attention and community concern about use of force is heightened. Here, de-escalation is treated as more than a single tactic or a short course. The COPS Office frames it as a set of verbal and nonverbal skills that help officers slow situations down, improve situational awareness, conduct better threat assessments, and make decisions that reduce the chance of a physical confrontation or injury. Importantly, the solicitation emphasizes a comprehensive, agency-wide approach, meaning training should connect to organizational supports like policy and procedure, supervision and accountability practices, after-action reviews of use-of-force incidents, and the use of data to identify trends and improve performance. The goal is safer outcomes in police-community encounters and improved perceptions of fairness, legitimacy, and mutual respect.

Funding is offered through cooperative agreements (not a standard grant), which signals that the COPS Office expects close involvement in shaping deliverables, reviewing training products, and ensuring quality control. The solicitation anticipates up to four awards, with an award ceiling of $750,000 per award. The opportunity was posted March 30, 2023, with an original closing date of May 15, 2023, and like most federal awards it is subject to the availability of appropriated funds and any additional legal requirements that may apply. Statutory authority is cited under the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (as amended) and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Title I, Part Q (34 U.S.C. 10381 et seq.).

Eligibility is intentionally narrow. The regional centers must be administered by accredited institutions of higher education, and applicants that are not accredited colleges or universities are explicitly out of scope and will not be considered. The program also excludes proposals that do not offer a comprehensive approach to de-escalation or that rely on training that is not nationally certified. Another key boundary is geographic reach: applicants must be able to serve more than one state. In other words, this is not intended to fund a single-state academy expansion or a local-only training program; it is built around multistate regional delivery, with the expectation that regional coverage can be adjusted after awards are made to ensure national coverage overall.

To be competitive, applicants are expected to show they can deliver comprehensive, nationally certified de-escalation training and related programming to a diverse set of state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies across a multistate region. They also need to demonstrate they can coordinate with other regional de-escalation centers and a national training coordinator, which suggests a networked model where training standards, scheduling, and lessons learned are shared across centers. Strong applications should clearly explain the applicant institution's experience delivering law enforcement training at scale, identify the nationally certified curricula they will use, and lay out how training will be delivered both onsite at participating agencies and at the center itself (for host sessions). Applicants are also expected to describe how they will market the training across the region, including outreach to state associations and other channels that can reach agencies beyond existing partners.

The solicitation spells out the main project objectives applicants should address in their narrative. These include describing any de-escalation training already being offered and how it would be modified or updated if needed; showing capacity and experience providing and promoting training across multiple states; explaining how the program will push an agency-wide culture of de-escalation rather than a one-off class for individual officers; estimating how many officers the center expects to train; describing how the center will ensure quality and consistency across different training deliveries and locations; and presenting a realistic sustainability plan for keeping the center operating beyond the COPS Office award period. For site-specific work, letters of support from the agencies to be served are strongly encouraged, which helps show demand, commitment, and readiness to implement training.

Deliverables are expected to be concrete and clearly spelled out in the project narrative, with the core focus on delivering and promoting the nationally certified comprehensive de-escalation training and programming. Because this is a CPD solicitation, there is also an underlying expectation that the work contributes to broader field knowledge and usable guidance, and that it aligns with COPS Office ideas about "good guidance." The solicitation highlights four qualities it wants in knowledge products and guidance tied to the work: they should be quality-driven and action-oriented (reducing variation in performance), evidence-based (aligned with the best available research identified through systematic review), accessible (plain language and manageable length for practitioners), and memorable (easy to recall and apply in complex, high-stress situations). Applicants are also encouraged to pay attention to COPS Office performance measures when shaping project goals and activities.

Finally, award recipients must be prepared to follow the COPS Office training development, delivery, and launch requirements. These requirements function like a structured quality-control process with review and approval checkpoints, standards for content and format, and expectations around evaluation so the training stays current, relevant, and consistent with community policing principles. Applicants should be able to describe how they will comply with those requirements and how they will evaluate training delivery and outcomes. The solicitation also makes clear that the federal government retains a royalty-free, nonexclusive, irrevocable license to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the training materials (in whole or in part) for federal purposes and to authorize others to use them, consistent with 2 C.F.R. 200.315(b). For formatting and publication-style expectations tied to deliverables, applicants are instructed to follow the COPS Office Editorial and Style Manual. For questions, the program points to the COPS Office Response Center (800-421-6770) and AskCopsRC@usdoj.gov during standard weekday business hours.

• The Department of Justice, Community Oriented Policing Services in the law, justice and legal services sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "FY23 Continuation and Expansion of Regional De-Escalation Training Centers - Community Policing Development Solicitation" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 16.710.
• This funding opportunity was created on Mar 30, 2023.
• Applicants must submit their applications by May 15, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $750,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 4 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

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