National Institute of Justice Grant: Research and Evaluation for Forensic Evidence in Public Laboratories

To advance Executive Order 13929 Safe Policing for Safe Communities, the Attorney General determined that all state, local, and university or college law enforcement agencies must be certified by an approved independent credentialing body or have started the certification process, to be eligible for FY 2022 DOJ discretionary grant funding. To become certified, the law enforcement agency must meet two mandatory conditions: (1) the agency’s use-of-force policies adhere to all applicable federal, state, and local laws and (2) the agency’s use-of-force policies prohibit chokeholds except in situations where use of deadly force is allowed by law. The certification requirement also applies to law enforcement agencies receiving DOJ discretionary grant funding through a subaward. For detailed information on this certification requirement, please visit https://cops.usdoj.gov/SafePolicingEO to access the Standards for Certification on Safe Policing for Safe Communities, the Implementation Fact Sheet, and the List of Designated Independent Credentialing Bodies.

Foreign governments, foreign organizations, and foreign colleges and universities are not eligible to apply. Federal agencies are eligible to apply. (Any award made to a federal agency will be made as an inter-agency reimbursable agreement.) Applicants must be, or be partnered with, publicly funded forensic science laboratories that are currently accredited by an independent accrediting or certifying forensic science organization. Publicly funded forensic science laboratories include state, regional, county, municipal, and tribal agencies.

All recipients and subrecipients (including any for-profit organization) must forgo any profit or management fee.

With this solicitation, NIJ seeks proposals for rigorous research and evaluation projects that will:

Identify and inform the forensic community of best practices through the evaluation of existing laboratory protocols; and/or
Have a direct and immediate impact on laboratory efficiency and assist in making laboratory policy decisions.

The intent of this program is to direct the findings of this research and evaluation toward the identification of the most efficient, accurate, reliable, and cost-effective methods for the identification, analysis, and interpretation of physical evidence for criminal justice purposes. Projects should address the challenges and needs of the forensic science community, including, but not limited to, the operational needs discussed at the 2020 and 2021 TWG meetings, which may be found on NIJ.ojp.gov. NIJ’s Forensic Science Technology Working Group (TWG) assists in identifying and prioritizing operational needs and requirements of the field, which are intended to facilitate proposal development. Additional research needs of the forensic science community can be found at the Organization of Scientific Area Committees website.

Applications proposing research involving partnerships with criminal justice or other agencies, should include a strong letter of support, signed by an appropriate decision-making authority from each proposed, partnering agency. A letter of support should include the partnering agency’s acknowledgement that de-identified data derived from, provided to, or obtained through this project will be archived by the grant recipient in accordance with their data archiving plan (see Data Archiving Plan under “Application and Submission Information”). If selected for award, grantees will be expected to have a formal agreement in place with partnering agencies by January 1, 2023. That formal agreement must include a provision to meet the data archiving requirements of the award.

In the case of partnerships that will involve the use of federal award funds by multiple partnering agencies to carry out the proposed project, only one entity/partnering agency may be the applicant (as is the case with any application submitted in response to this solicitation); any others must be proposed as subrecipients.