No active solicitation right now. Check OVW's annual funding opportunities page. Cycle varies by year.
Browse active grants →OVW program supporting law enforcement and prosecutors to investigate and prosecute cybercrimes against individuals. Explicitly allows funding for forensic analyses and digital forensics equipment and training.
Apply directly on grants.gov, no state intermediary. The applicant is a state, tribe or unit of local government, so a police department or digital forensics lab applies through it, and the chief executive must sign a certification.
Official program pageState, tribal, territorial, and local law enforcement agencies and prosecutors. Digital forensics units within law enforcement are primary eligible applicants for equipment and analysis components.
Awards per year: FY2024 11 · FY2025 8
Round totals: DOJ Office on Violence Against Women award lists. Award lists: USAspending.gov, plus DOJ’s own award list for rounds USAspending is missing. The award list covers only awards whose descriptions mention forensic work.
General advice for this program, not taken from the notice. The notice’s own review criteria are what reviewers actually score, so check these against it.
Explicitly connect your forensic lab's cybercrime enforcement activities to violence against women cases, such as online stalking, sextortion, or digital evidence in domestic violence prosecutions. Reviewers must see a direct link between your proposed work and OVW's statutory mandate.
Provide specific, data-driven documentation of your lab's current cybercrime case backlog, equipment deficiencies, or staffing shortfalls using metrics like average case processing time or number of unexamined devices. Concrete numbers demonstrate measurable need and make your application stand out.
Do not submit broad descriptions of cybercrime trends without tying them specifically to gender-based violence cases handled by your jurisdiction, as reviewers will penalize applicants who fail to demonstrate program-specific relevance. Vague narratives signal a misunderstanding of this funding stream's scope.
Never submit lump-sum budget line items for equipment or personnel without itemized cost breakdowns and vendor quotes, as insufficient budget justification is a leading cause of scoring deductions under CFDA 16.060 reviews. Each expenditure must be traceable to a specific programmatic outcome.
A starting list, not the official one. Each notice ends with its own application checklist, and that is the list to work from once a round opens.
