$2.5M grants to enhance child exploitation investigations by police

By Andrea Fox, Gov1.com

Up to $2.5 million in federal funding will be awarded to support the development and advancement of investigative technology tools by local police and partner agencies to enhance child exploitation investigations.

Cities, towns, counties, tribal and state governments and non-profit or higher education partners can apply to increase the technological investigative capacity and implement training for law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies under the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs’ Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s (OJJDP) Strengthening Investigative Tools and Technology for Combating Child Sexual Exploitation grant program.

The discretionary grant program is expected to make up to six awards and will focus on methods and technologies that address child pornography, exploitation and sex trafficking of minors.

Proposed approaches may include:

• Developing new protocols for ascertaining the identity of child exploitation offenders using anonymization networks, in particular, Tor and Freenet.
• Targeting offenders who exploit children through webcams, including online enticement, sextortion and live-streaming of child sexual abuse.
• Exploring legal and technological tools to ensure access to evidence encrypted by offenders.
• Building forensic capacity and expertise to meet the challenges that mobile devices with built-in encryptions and cloud-based storage pose to online child exploitation investigations.
• Identifying gaps in existing tools and resources.
• Developing tools that use artificial intelligence to assist law enforcement in efficiently processing large amounts of investigatory leads.
• Developing new software programs or investigative tools to fill the gaps; increase capacity and assist federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement partners in covert investigative work.
• Supporting research activities that help to identify characteristics, patterns or other indicators that predict which offenders are likely to be the most dangerous/high-priority suspects.

There is no matching requirement. The deadline to apply is July 29, 2019.

Awards are expected to be made under cooperative agreement beginning on October 1, 2019. Review the solicitation on OJJDP.gov. Apply on Grants.gov.