City Hall this afternoon provided a copy of the Wednesday e-mail from the U.S. Department of Justice telling Stockton it would receive funding for no more than 20 police officers – if any – far fewer than the city had hoped. Here it is:
U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Community Oriented Policing Services
Office of the Director
1100 Vermont Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530
Dear Chief of Police Blair Ulring;
Re: COPS Hiring Recovery Program (CHRP) Application
Agency Name: Stockton Police Department
ORI: CA03905
Your agency recently submitted an application for funding under the 2009 solicitation for the COPS Hiring Recovery Program (CHRP). The review of applications for CHRP is still on-going and there has been an overwhelming amount of requests. Currently, more than 7,200 law enforcement agencies nationwide requested over $8 billion dollars in federal funding to hire new or preserve current positions with this funding. Due to the number of agencies that have requested funding and the amount of total funds requested the COPS Office may not be able to fund the entire amount of funding requested by each agency.
In the original application submission by your agency, 115 total positions were requested as indicated in the following categories:
· 0 to hire new officer positions,
· 4 to rehire officer positions that have already been laid-off (at the time of application), and/or
· 111 to rehire officer positions that were scheduled to be laid-off at a future date (as of the date of application).
If your agency were to be awarded, the COPS Office has determined that we must cap the total number of officers available to you at 20. As a result, we are contacting you to determine how this modified number of positions would be allocated across the funding categories (i.e., new hires, rehiring of officer positions already laid off, and rehiring of officer positions scheduled to be laid off).
To provide us with updated figures please log onto COPS online at www.cops.usdoj.gov and click on the account access link in the upper right hand corner. Please use your username and password to access your account, and select “CHRP Officer Reduction Form” from the menu of services. You may then enter the number of officers for each category, but please do not exceed 20 positions. If you have any questions you may contact the COPS Office Response Center at 800.421.6770 or email us at AskCOPSRC@usdoj.gov.
It is crucial that you log onto the website and fill-out the form by 6:00 PM EDT Friday 6/26/09. Failing to respond to this request may delay the review of your application or negatively impact your agency’s ability to receive funding.
Finally, please note that this email in no way indicates that your agency has been awarded or will be awarded under the CHRP 2009 program. It is a collection of additional information to be taken into consideration with your overall application package.
Sincerely,
COPS CHRP Coordination Team